Japanese practice and the airlines: what value do you place on learning?

Calling airline professionals in revenue management. Tom Bacon has been taking a look at how established practices could do with a rethink

Jugyokenkyu. That’s the term used to describe the Japanese art of systematic and collaborative research to improve teaching and student outcomes. Building a Better Teacher by Elizabeth Green cites it as the key to better teaching. Colleagues sit in on your class and, afterwards, dissect a 45-minute class for hours.

Similarly, An Astronauts’s Guide to Life on Earth by Chris Hadfield outlines how scientists take apart every manned flight:

                NASA prepared, in incredible detail, for every launch. It developed multiple plans for each scenario (Plans A, B, C, and D); and it specified what astronauts, along with the NASA engineers, should do for every possible contingency. As expected, the level of preparation was indeed tremendous. 

                But the book also describes how the NASA engineers and astronauts spend almost as much time debriefing after a launch – what happened, what worked and what didn’t, what could have gone better. They review every single decision in excruciating detail – how could they do better next time?

Both jugyokenkyu and NASA are designed around learning. ‘Better Teacher’ believes in continuous improvement. And, perhaps even more than error-free launches, the mission of the whole space programme is learning. Both teachers and space scientists see their job as one of learning, recognising what they don’t already know and finding room for improvement.

Who else spends as much effort on such post-audits? Does your airline or travel company? What value do you place on Learning?

Revenue management departments that I have worked with are much better at planning for major events than at de-briefing afterwards. This reflects our greater orientation to results and less towards learning. But, of course, in the longer term, ‘results’ and ‘learning’ are very much related. In RM, in particular, the marketplace is dynamic and the ‘science’ is imprecise – so learning is critical.

For example, we in RM often plan in detail for major events or trends that impact travel demand:

  • A major holiday, especially a ‘moving holiday’ like Christmas
  • A major event, like the World Cup
  • A major pricing initiative like launching branded fares

Getting these events or initiatives right frequently has tremendous importance for the whole organisation. Such events can represent a disproportionate fraction of profitability for the year. Therefore, the associated planning includes hundreds of details.

  • What each function does
  • The work plan required
  • Steps that need to be accomplished by when
  • Dependencies among the tasks, contingencies, benchmarks, etc.

The blame game

As a rule, we don’t do as good a job in the post-audit phase. More often, we are on to the next challenge - content with a high-level view that ‘we did a good job’, or that ‘revenue increased almost as much as forecast’. Even if we acknowledge that we missed the boat, it is not normally reviewed in detail – instead, we may resort to arguments that ‘it was unprecedented and unpredictable’. We may even finger point among departments (‘sales didn’t tell us’) or a very macro-assessment (‘the booking curve moved in on us”).

Perhaps, like space travel and consistent with jugyokenkyu, we should allocate almost as much resource to post-audit as to pre-planning. If it is worth it to invest in a project/event, it probably is worth it to do the post-audit that will help the next time.

To do a post-audit properly, the whole planning team needs to stay engaged after the event. The entire plan/timeline/workplan should be reviewed, step-by-step. Even those activities that went satisfactorily should be reviewed – how could we have improved the results?

‘Learning’ needs to be elevated in priority in many organisations, but especially in revenue management. Processes need to be developed that can pass on information after a major event or initiative for the next time; revenue management needs a disciplined post-audit process. Bottom line, executives should demand learning in addition to Results.

Tom Bacon is a 25-year airline veteran and industry consultant in revenue optimisation. 

Questions?  Contact Tom at tom.bacon@yahoo.com or visit his website http://makeairlineprofitssoar.wordpress.com/

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