United is the butt of everyone’s jokes and derision, including mine, but it maybe useful to consider how  they got there.

Carlos Munoz was awarded the communicator of the year  in March, a few weeks before the unfortunate Dr Dao booked a seat to go and see a patient in Louisville. This now seems to be the ultimate irony, and I suspect the communicator of the year award now has its own PR problem.

However, in hindsight, a real brain-fart seems almost inevitable , with several recent similar events, and even further back, Dave Carroll‘s guitar signalling a truly broken culture.

When you think about it, the actions on flight 3411 were driven by the rigid, unthinking application of a set of rules.  The culture of an airline is one based on checklists, inviolable rules, and strict adherence to those rules. When you are flying, and want the plane to stay up, it seems that it may be a good idea to have whole sets of rules that ensure that it does so.

Perhaps the challenge at United may not have been about the stupidity and arrogance of staff, after all they are people, who have the same concerns and pressures, loves and joys that the rest of us have, but about the culture of rules that drive behaviour, and do not allow any room for doubt. Mix that with a few insensitive individuals and you have the toxic mix demonstrated so visibly on flight 3411

When there is a rule, follow it, without question, creativity or deviation.

That explains away the actions, sort of.

So the challenge is how to have a rule based culture that ensures that the job gets done the right way, every time, co-existing with one that  enables individual initiative and sensitivity to the situation.

This is not a unique challenge.

Almost every business  I work with is a medium sized manufacturer, they require rules to operate safely and efficiently, and the less explicit, transparent and flexible the rules are, the greater the CUS (cock up score) that exists.

One of the tenets of the TPS is ‘respect for people’ and never has the value of this as a foundation of culture been more on display that at United, over a long period.

Respect for People is a double sided coin. On one side there is the necessity for stable, repeatable and optimised processes, and the other on personal initiative and situational sensitivity, challenging to reflect in a set of detailed rules.  At the intersection is respect for people, their intelligence, initiative, desire to do the job as best they can, and go home safely.

At the time of posting, United CEO and chief PR guru Munoz has come out with a couple of further statements. The first outlines changes to improve customer experience as a result of the ‘incident’. This,  in contrast to the blame shifting and destructive crap put out after the incident is not a bad effort, but it reflects no more than a reasonable expectation of someone paying for a seat on a plane. At least it is clear, and Munoz at last took responsibility for the treatment of Dr Dao. The second simply announces that Dr Dao and United have reached an ‘amicable resolution’ of the incident, without any details. My guess is that the next time Dr Dao needs to fly anywhere, he can just call up his private plane, no need to  bother with those uncomfortable commercial flights any more.

As a final thought, the only one in an organisation who can really change a prevailing culture is the person at the top. I guess United needs a new one, as both a symbol that they are committed to change, and to get the process going in deeds rather than just a bunch of belated words following the crappola sandwich first served up.