Creating the operations centre at Boeing

Seattle, Washington.

This morning’s keynote was a four person panel presentation from the team that created the Boeing Operations Centre, which is the primary face of Boeing’s interaction with their customers, helping them with maintenance and servicing issues. The presentation was given by Peter Weertman, Bruce Rund, Bob Wiebe and Darren Macer. This post is a collaborative harvest of that keynote by myself, Tenneson Woolf and Teresa Posakony.

One thing to notice about people that work at Boeing is that they almost always talk about their relationship to planes dating back to being kids, they take great pride in their work and they all see the work of designing and building planes to be very, very cool. Bob Wiebe, talking now, began his presentation like this, and almost everyone I know at Boeing also checks in to their work this way. There is a lot of heart and deep commitment in their work. It is more often than not a chance to express some aspiration or intention that was held from childhood and that is renewed every time they step on a plane or see one flying over head, Imagine having a relationship to your work like that.

This panel is presenting on a the process they went through to produce a new state of the art Operations Centre to support the needs of customers whose planes were on the ground. It required creating a “new normal” which wasn’t everybody’s normal, and it certainly wasn’t the old normal. Wiebe describes it as a process of moving forward and sliding back – a form of rapid prototyping. I’m hearing this as the practice of sparring in taekwondo, where you slip in and out and back and forth, trying things to see how your opponent reacts, adjusting your strategy to meet the challenge that is in front of you, and understanding that the opponent is also adjusting and changing, based on what you do. It’s a continuous feedback loop and engagement with a dynamic changing system, and this is the ground in which strategy and tactics translates into action.

The shortest distance between two people is a story…these guys started with stories. Are we designed properly to deliver on customer satisfaction? The group went on a learning journey and discovered how other companies do it and is covered that good operations support can actually support and drive customer satisfaction. Boeing looked at previous integration efforts and realized that the thing that made them fall short was the fact that they weren’t based on the most engagement possible. Engagement is critical to moving everyone in the system towards the new normal.

Airplanes now run at 1% not in operation, down from 3% previously. There is not a lot of space on airplanes. Utilization and passenger loads continue to increase. What this means to Boeing is that what used to be a couple of days to figure something out has now been reduced to a couple of hours. How to live with this? The solution again was to work, to engage, to be in conversation with each other, all in support of Boeing’s business objectives. From this came clarity of the voice of the customer and turned elephants to bold recommendations to action plans.

Bruce … helped lead the change in the ops centre. He used to run rough shod over people as his form of leadership. He learned as part of the new normal:

• make yourself part of the solution

• get up and talk to people

• peers get curious when you engage them at the level of caring for the work

• cross boundaries to collaborate – this is powerful

• stories of success and failure helped us to see causal loops

• bring level of response from expert to the customer

A power in this sessions is Boeing’s commitment to learning in complex systems. Their customer service was known as “black hole” because things come in and never leave. They mapped plans, causal loops, etc. under much pressure. Their path and action began with engagement. It makes me think of what to do in the in the complex systems we are all in – this is what we share – begin talking with each other. Go from never talked, never knowing the options to the simple, yet focused interaction of human beings learning together to improve. Begin with curiosity. Come back to the energy of childhood dreams of planes and invite that into the form of learning, listening, and wise action with the broader system including customers. “Open to the wisdom of the local effort and connect to others.”

Open up to the customer, to the stakeholder, to those who are in the system to collaborate around options and build trust. When Boeing was getting the engagement strategy started, they encountered some tough systemic barriers to communications arising from hero and expert behaviour. Two of the most tonic behaviours were experts saying to teams “That’s not the way I would have done it” which is behaviour that trumps engagement and reconsolidates power in the expert, undermining collaboration. The second behaviour was that the experts or the authorities reserved the right to make final decisions on their own time. This introduced delays in responses to customers that were unacceptable. The initiative introduced rules of engagement – or what we call principles of cooperation in the chaordic stepping stones process – that would serve emergence of the new normal.

World War II pilot: “You know you are getting close, because the flak gets heavier.”

“Help me understand, here’s what I think, tell me more, here’s the story…” This frame of structured curiosity is a fast way into what David Isaacs is calling “conversational leadership.”

This is really brining home for me the power of the chaordic stepping stones:

• Need: identifying the real red spot, in this case “Schedule pressure”
• Purpose: The initiative has to address the need. So let’s get clear on the purpose of the initiative.
• People: Who is involved? Who else needs to be involved? And who else? And how?
• Principles of cooperation: If we are moving towards the new normal, what are the new principles we need to work with to get us there?
• Concept: Start plugging away at prototypes. One of the overwhelming sentiments at this conference is that small wins, rapid prototypes and little shifts are the origin of the bigger changes. Conceptualizing and learning from that prototyping process gets us there.
• Structure: Build what works into the system. Tie it to relationships and infrastructure to create sustainability and shared ownership.
• Practice: Do it and learn from it and keep doing it and keep learning from it.

Darren is now describing how to operationalize the vision and they did it by physically

designing space that helped. This meant putting everyone who receives customer requests at the centre and fanning people out around them to physically embody the system. They got a big AV wall – inspired by the NASA command centre – and agreed to put stuff up there that was useful to everyone in the system. This is rapid harvesting, allowing the system to interact with the information it needs AND to see the impact of its work. They were playing with gaming concepts like each job is a dot and they have to get the job off the screen before it passes the magic time line. Everything was created live with engagement, rapid prototyping, and lots of shifting to see reality. They even have a TV running to see what comes through traditional news like the plan running off the runway in Chicago in 2005.

We used everything we could.

The first day – December 9, 2005. They were bring people together into the same room across many different groups, disciplines and silos. They did a lot of simulation and scenarios to pick up everything they could before going live and that the processes were as simple as possible. Lots of effort to get everyone to follow the processes – to the letter – then to notice what they learn so after a bit they could look back to these agreements to see what needs to shift. Anything they wanted changed they were to put on a sticky note and put on the way. They couldn’t take anything down until the change had been made or the reasons for not changing was communicated to everyone. They even changed the coffee pot… if you’re working 24/7 you need a good coffee pot.

This is how you learn about processes by tapping everyone’s wisdom and experience.

The truth of all of this is that Boeing didn’t have a lot of time. They had a lot of dedicated people who really wanted to make it work, and there were a lot of difficult times and situations. Darren is sharing that change can be personalized and that there are a lot of people at Boeing that don’t like him. People will find ways of sabotaging, undermining or opposing these kinds of efforts and the commitment to dedicate to change can be very hard. You need to develop a thick skin and mostly talk to people A LOT. If people have better ways of doing things, you have to understand and use them. If they don’t have better ways of doing things, they have to know that the channels are open and passion and responsibility is the operating system of learning. NOT talking to people will be the quickest way to make the tough experiences grind everything to a halt. So this kind of rapid action and change in a furiously turbulent and unpredictable environment with lots of moving pieces REQUIRES leaders to be almost a constant conversation with others listening skilfully, collaborating, finding new ways of working, rapid prototyping and making small changes.

[tags]stia2007[/tags]