I am passionate about making sense of airline data that don't say much about the intricacies of things that shaped them, so that undesired changes in planned operations and consequent losses can be minimised or prevented. My work is focused on bridging this information gap by using disruptions as change messengers to access and address the origins of hidden but avoidable losses. Methods and tools designed to support these activities have evolved over time, bringing new insights into this still insufficiently explored area of airline management. My consultancy Astute Aviation is taking the next step in that direction.
What drew me into this work in the first place were the many years of involvement in complex decision making, especially while being responsible for managing commercial planning and scheduling departments - the crossroads of conflicting requirements between strategic and corporate side, and front-line decision-makers. My later involvement in strategic and operational management, as well as information and data modeling, helped me gain an insider’s view of the conflicting interests created by organizational detachments. At the same time these helped me to understand the interactions between data, people, and processes that seem impossible to identify and control but are essential for shaping the future of airlines.
The decisive moment that influenced my decision to do what I do today happened after finalising the disruption cost evaluation for a major airline. In order to calculate authentic cost of a single, but complex disruption event and identify its full operational consequences (including long knock-on effects), loss of revenue, and impact on passengers I was driven from one department to another, ending up with meeting 36 people across the organisation to finalise the project. The number of independent data storages was counted in hundreds and people were not aware about who is exactly doing what and where the information I was looking for could be found. The project ended up with astonishing results - the real loss was about three times higher than originally estimated.
This was an eye-opening experience. I learned widely and deeply about problems typical for almost every airline across the industry. I learned more about the ongoing issues than one could ever learn from all existing management reports put together. It has become clear that disruption loss analysis including data and insights and supported by the right tools, can be applied much more widely to improve operational and cost efficiency and quality of service.
A number of subsequent work engagements I undertook contributed to validate these observations further, and subsequently the concepts that underpin what I do today. Bringing more authenticity into decision making across organisations and domains has been central to my activities over years, including consulting, software modelling, articles and book writing, speeches, lectures, webinars, blogging, and interviewing fresh thinkers from inside and outside of the airline industry. My work on improving decision-making processes that benefit entire organisation continues and constantly evolves.
