Culture Matters

For US Airways Flight 1549's jet crash 'miracle on the Hudson' birds were the word
but the episode offers insights on the importance of scenarios for your business.

by Tom Posey, Posey Associates

With both engines out, the flight's pilot, Chelsey B. "Sully" Sullenberger, airborne for only three minutes, calmly banked his Airbus A320, and brought it down to a text-book perfect landing in the cold, grey water of the Hudson River.

Moments before, his airplane, bound for Charlotte, North Carolina, had struck a flight of birds during take-off from LaGuardia Airport, knocking out both engines, hydraulics and fuel.

Flight 1549 was lucky. Chelsey B. Sullenberger was a highly trained pilot, well prepared to handle emergencies, and it was perhaps divine intervention that placed 'Sully', an experienced glider pilot, at the flight wheel of that dead airplane.

The landing, flight crew performance and rescue were phenomenal, with all 155 passengers and crew members safe.

But for those of us that work with scenario analysis, while Flight 1549 is more of a vignette than a scenario, it does inform on the importance for your business to understand how it is viewing and using its own future.

Your Future is a not a Static Target?When 'Sully' and Flight 1549 took off from LaGuardia on that January 15th morning, Sully believed his Formal Future was a safe landing, wheels touching down, on the tarmac runway of the Douglas International Airport in Charlotte, North Carolina.

Minutes after take-off, Sully knew he was being presented with a trajectory that was not leading him to his Formal Future.

Isn't it the case in business, that after some strenuous examinations, we then cast our best knowledge forward into the future (forecast), and establish a future target? And isn't it true, that we find ourselves planning with incremental, budgeted care, a path to this projected future target? This Formal Future?

As Sully can tell you, your Formal Future is not a target, nor a destination that you can place 'out there' and have it wait for you to arrive on the arbitrary date you've picked for it.

Your Formal Future is racing right at you, and if you are lucky and if you have prepared, then you will have enough early warning signals that the future coming at you is different than the future you have projected; you can act and adjust.

Unlike predictions, forecasts, projections, preferences, or stories you tell about your own strategy, scenarios offer a much more credible, challenging, coherent Formal Future for which to prepare. Because of the rigor of formation and the increase in plausibility, they allow you to be more confident in your level of uncertainty.

In my work with companies, many undergoing tremendous transformational change, scenarios become a critical component of the strategic planning process. With scenarios, these companies are getting a much clearer glimpse of their multiple futures; and, as these companies can tell you, once you have seen your multiple futures, you cannot help acting differently in your current present.

Isn't it the case today, in the current present, that your take-off from LaGuardia Airport includes different signals now that you are aware that dangerous collisions between aircraft and large birds have increased 62% since 2000?

In the world of business, especially in our current economic environment, scenarios can give your company a critical, competitive edge, and in some cases, help you avoid disaster.

Some people really know how to fly.

Thomas D. Posey is the founder of Posey Associates, LLC, a professional consulting firm providing experienced counsel to clients on Strategy and Alignment, Leadership Transformation, Executive and Team Coaching and Scenarios. He is a graduate of the Scenarios Programme, University of Oxford, Oxford, England.
www.poseyassociatesllc.com