Ah, the treasures of flying standby.
After waiting until at the gate and watching one person after another board a Friday evening flight home from DFW, I began wondering whether or not I would get on the flight.
As a frequent flyer I was #5 on a standby list of more than 70, and I just wanted to get home. In fact I was willing to give up a first class ticket for a flight 2 hours later to sit in row 42 next to the bathroom just to not spend another dreadful minute in the airport after what seemed like an 80 hour work week.
Finally, my name is called and I was given the golden ticket (Row 22, middle seat). It wasn’t first class, but I was heading home.
Seemed things were going my way. Until I showed up at the seat I was assigned to find out that the seat was taken.
I turned around and headed back to the front of the plane where I was told another seat to try and yet again it was taken.
Stay with me here…
As I again walked to the front of the plane I noticed half a dozen seats that were available and I thought to myself why do I keep getting put into seats that were taken.
Approaching the gate agent, he looks at me and says, “Sir, you are going to have to get off the plane, there was a mistake and there isn’t a seat available.”
I looked at him and replied, “I don’t understand, I can see at least 5 seats from here that are open. Can I not be given one of those seats?”
Looking at his sheet of paper, he said “The seats are not open according to my information so no, you cannot.”
Heading back up the Jet Bridge I was stopped and guided back to the plane and put into row 27 middle seat. Best news of the day and what seemed like a small victory after the headache I just endured.
When I finally arrived at my seat I could only laugh and think…
Wow, it is really mind boggling that they were going to remove me from the plane even though there were obviously open seats on the plane.”
After that came to mind a snarky thought about American Airlines, Bankruptcy and “Duh.” Then I moved on and thought this.
Why do businesses constantly make things so hard?
I understand that American is governed by many rules and regulations and you can’t just sit anywhere. That really isn’t the issue I’m taking, it is more the way that we can be so dismissive of good data only to do what makes no sense.
In the case of the airplane, there were open seats. Figure out what has to be done to fill them and then do so. But for goodness sake don’t just stare at your piece of paper, take the easy route and shrug your shoulders.
It is so often that our eyes are telling us the story and the mind is processing the information and it all makes a ton of sense, yet even though our mental steering wheel is saying “LEFT, GO LEFT,” our hands pull right? At that point every rationale bone in our body is screaming to our conscience saying “You Nincompoop.”
In our lives we are constantly looking at open seats. Think about these scenarios, has this ever been you?
There is an employee in your organization that is clearly not performing and showing no signs of improvement. Yet we decide to keep them for months or even years because it is easier than making a change.
You have an opportunity to win a customer but it is going to take you way off course (or even a little off course) from your plan. However you go ahead and “Grab the business.”
In the middle of a project you realize there is no way that you will meet a deadline. Instead of reaching out to the customer and communicating early on, you wait until the end to miss the date?
These types of situations arise every day, and every day certain businesses win by doing what clearly makes sense and other businesses take steps backward by not trusting what they see.
In all cases where we may have done this or witnessed others who have, it was probably rare if ever that the decider didn’t know what they should do.
For some reason we did it anyway. But why?
The reasons that we make the wrong decision can be anything from laziness to fear to emotions overriding our rational thoughts. But it doesn’t change the fact that it isn’t deep down that we know the truth, it is actually right there at the surface.
You know how we often say “Make a gut decision?”
Guess what, the gut decision isn’t a gut decision at all. What we are really saying is take the obvious information that is right in front of you and all the immediate feelings that the information is providing you and trust yourself to make the right decision.
While undoubtedly you may get it wrong a few times throughout your career, chances are you will quite often get it right.
Deep down actually ends up becoming the conflictive messages that end up leading us to getting things wrong.
To give just the lightest bit of credit to American Airlines, who I am regrettably still a customer of, they did “fill the seat,” But my goodness did they make it hard for themselves, the other passengers and me.
For them it may be too late to ever embrace making things simpler, but for you it is never too late to do so.
Business CAN be simpler, but you have to let it be and it comes down to this…
Trust what your mind is telling you and then take action.
