Charting A Wiser Course
How Aviation Can Address the Human Side of Change
Kaye M. Shackford
with Joseph E. Shackford

THE BOOK

Charting A Wiser Course is an important dialogue that needs to happen through all layers of any industry...

INTRODUCTION

It was not accidental that the September 11th terrorists targeted our core institutions of aviation, finance, and defense. The aviation industry has been in a sickening flat spin ever since. The global economy needs our industry to survive, stabilize, and rebuild. Our various businesses and people have their own passionately personal reasons to wish for the same outcome.

The task before us is gargantuan.

The good news - if you can call it that - is that much of the mess we’re currently in is of our own making. If we created it, we can change it.

Throughout the industry businesses are reworking strategy, markets, products, and organizational structure. They have laid off appalling numbers of people. They are simultaneously implementing major change initiatives - lean applied to the manufacturing floor and business processes, Six Sigma, value-streaming, supply-chain management, and others. They are seeking to implement massive changes in how they work in the marketplace with suppliers, customers, and partners. And they’re also trying to change dramatically the working relationships between management and employee groups.

But there’s one key element that no one is paying sufficient attention to. Without it, these other efforts won’t succeed.

To chart a wiser course in aviation (and in our other infrastructure industries*), one that will let us achieve our objectives, we must address this element as well.

What’s encouraging is that businesses can start to address this critical element now without massive expenditure of resources.

Implemented wisely, this element will immediately start to provide them with better results, and will make more attainable the rest of the work they need to do. It will also give their people some respite, improvement, and hope, even as they’re working to identify and shift towards the large strategic changes more appropriate to today’s environment.

It has to do not with the content side of change, but with the process side of change, with what Douglas McGregor called “the human side of enterprise.”1 It has to do with how we do what we do with one another.

So what is this key element? It is a mind-change about the nature of reality. I intend to make a case that the environments in which we must now be effective, and our own strategic objectives, have changed so much that we literally can’t achieve those objectives using our current behaviors.

I then will describe why we must, and how we can, align our behaviors with our objectives so we can accomplish the monumental task of rebuilding our businesses and industry.

Aligning your behaviors with your objectives sounds like a simple thing to do. In actuality, accomplishing widespread and lasting behavior change across an organization or an industry is hard. Perhaps because it seems that this should be simple, until now management has given it short shrift. It certainly has not been included in business plans and measurements.

Those who have addressed it at all have sought to get people to change behaviors through managerial pronouncements, mission and value statements, intentions, and exhorting them to try harder.

Sometimes they invested in skills training.

Nothing really changed.

The challenge is even more daunting because the very folks who need to establish, lead, and manage this paradigm-shifting change are precisely those people least prepared by training, inclination, or prior experience to do the job. They are the operations managers and leaders of their businesses. They didn’t earn advanced degrees in organizational behavior or human psychology. Their degrees are in aeronautical engineering or mechanical engineering or finance or marketing or business administration. Or they have Airframe & Powerplant licenses. Or they came up through the ranks.

Many of them have few skills at, and little interest in, what tends to be dismissed as the “touchyfeely” side of business. This touchy-feely stuff has just never seemed that important.

Yet if their businesses don’t effect corporatewide behavioral change at the paradigm-shift level, the Herculean change efforts they’re now attempting will fail.

Union leaders traditionally focus on preserving jobs and improving the conditions of employment. Operations managers usually look to their human resources and employee relations people to take care of “that stuff.” This might be all right when union leaders and managers are operating within an existing paradigm. But it’s not all right when they need to change the paradigm. In the midst of the rest of the upheavals, this, too, has to be their responsibility.

I think I can transfer to you the concepts and tools so that you can take this on wisely. I invite you on a journey with me to understand why it’s necessary, why it’s harder than it looks, and how it can be done.

If this book does what I expect, you should have a better appreciation for where we came from, what we learned, and what we’ve somehow forgotten. You’ll understand better how our past is sabotaging our present. You’ll have more clarity about how to move forward, an understanding of some of the roadblocks and quagmires, and you’ll have the mental resources to begin. The book won’t get you all the way there, but it should give you the concepts you need to prepare the rest of your plan in ways appropriate to your particular responsibilities.

The path I propose to take you on is sometimes a bit convoluted and theoretical. Much of it comes from life in the trenches; I hope it resonates with your own experience and causes you to smile or groan in recognition. It may put together for you elements you’ve known about but may not have linked before.

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*Though the examples I use are from the industry I know best, our students from other industries suggest the logic is as compelling and important for their industries as it is for mine.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

By now you've noticed most everything I've learned has been a gift from someone else. Some occurred so long ago I don't know who to thank. But in many cases, I do know, and am profoundly grateful.

I thank Bill Lindsay for opening up his entire organization to me, and Bob Curry, Dave Burton, Chuck Phillips and Austin De Groat for including me in the incredible culture change initiatives they enabled in GE-Aircraft Engines in the 1970s and beyond.

Thanks to Bob McMahon, Doug Mallon, Manny Manasian, Ron Brandstetter and design team members of our original program on negotiation who kept the program useful for their people, organizations and marketplace realities. I thank Chuck Chadwell, Ken Foley, Mick Thackeray, Frank Byrd, Dave McDonald, Joe Mays and the teams of trainers who took it forward, sometimes taking personal vacation time to do so, and Jean Bilien and Olivier Fagard, who brought it into Snecma to build team and a common approach to marketplace with their GE counterparts.

My thank to Rich Hodapp and Ann Rice Mullen for tailoring what they did to help my clients and me learn so much about being effective inside our own organizations and out into the marketplace.

I thank Lisa Crockett and Joni Raycroft, who saw the greater value of what we were doing, sometimes before we did; Mort Moriarty and Ed Northern at Pratt & Whitney for the incredible community they built; John Roe and his team at Hamilton Sundstrand; and Denise Hedges of the APFA and Sue Oliver of American Airlines, who knew there had to be a better way and put their careers on the line to find it.

My thanks to those who sought to find ways the Negotiating Solutions workshop could last beyond Joe and me: Erick and Sharon Jensen, Eric and Jean Rossol, Gerrie Linn, Howard Benden,Diane Beamer, Randy Ward, Kirk Joseph, Lynn Gates, Barb Williams, and Scott Whitman. And to those who read earlier versions of this book and made it better - Oliver Fagard, Bob Gates, Phil King, Jim Smith, Karen Odegard, Denise Hedges, Larry Ames, Leo Profilet, Jim Bailey, Bill Brown, Christine Probett, Joe Cronin, Wayne Huot, Bob Johnson, Ed Sarsfield and Ron Clegg among them.

My deepest appreciation to Bill Freeman and Jay Donoghue of Air Transport World, who decided the book could spur and perhaps focus an important dialogue within aviation, and who offered their resources to make it visible to our community.

And foremost and forever, to my husband, Joe Shackford. We set out to see if what we did could make a difference. We think it has and hope it will. We now pass it forward to you.

THE AUTHORS

Joe and Kaye Shackford lived this book. Kaye wrote it down. She learned the aviation business during twelve years with GE-Aircraft Engines in Lynn, Massachusetts, and Evendale, Ohio. Living in New Delhi, India, from 1986-89, while at the same time working for GE International in South Asia and Europe, taught her more about the global nature and wonder of our industry.

Joe Shackford began his professional career with Sikorsky Helicopter as a flight test engineer. After three years, he moved to GE-Aircraft Engines. Twenty-five years' experience as a functional manager in worldwide commercial sales and military aviation operations led in 1986 to his being named the first National Executive - India - for all GE product lines.

In 1988, Joe and Kaye formed the Mattford Group. Since then, they have helped thousands of people throughout the aviation industry (and from other industries working to reinvent themselves) discover the business and personal benefits produced by interest-based negotiation and interest-based management.

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