One morning at Heathrow

“Chris wants to do something for the cabin crew.”

“Sure, easy, I’ll go talk to him.”

It was 1985. I was the project manager in the near final stages of the British Airways Managing People First Programme, (MPF), a one-week long, custom leadership training program for the top 1000 people at BA. The pilot was less than a week away and I was already at BA HQ at Heathrow airport in London.

In 1984 I had been fired from my Forum Corporation sales job in Pittsburgh for “single-handedly turning a $1million territory into $250 thousand in one year.” My bosses and I didn’t know that the US steel industry was dying, and that the salesman I replaced had been shipping unordered training materials to local steel companies and their suppliers for over a year.

Dr. George Litwin hired me for his firm HRI. Dr. Litwin was the former Harvard Business School professor of the founders of the Forum Corporation, and the researcher and co-author of Motivation and Organizational Climate. George wanted me to be his salesman, but he and John Bray, one of Forum’s founders, had acquired a BA project at Heathrow. Customer service for this nationalized airline was abominable, and the newly hired chief executive, Colin Marshall, wanted to “fix the terminals.”

No manager at BA Heathrow had customer service in their job description. So a new group of managers was created and we designed and delivered the Passenger Group Management Programme (PGMP). I was suddenly designing and delivering custom training and I found I was good at it. After my defeat in the Steel City, I had a win, and it felt great.

We began research and I was on the MPF design team. John Bray asked me to write the proposal. I was always good at writing proposals, and I had been involved in the research and had taught PGMP and so I wrote the £2 million proposal. John Bray said “the proposal basically sold the work,” which was probably an exaggeration, but my swelled head didn’t believe that.

The team included some client and external PhDs in Organizational Psychology and Learning and Development. There were some uncomfortable moments when I was made aware that I was definitely out of my league. But, as a recent MBA, I put together the financials for the opening case, and shepherded all the various people writing materials. I project-managed production, arranged that we’d have on-site production and the computerized leadership feedback done in Boston would arrive in time for the pilot. We were on track and I was feeling good.

“No problem. Easy. I’ll go talk to Chris.”

And I did. The interview was a little rushed and my demeanor, I see now, was a little cocky. I met with the BA executive in charge of all worldwide “cabin crew,” all flight attendants, bursars, inspectors, in-flight security  and those who interfaced with cleaners, and ramp personnel. Chris was a nice guy and told me he wanted something like we’d done for the Passenger Group, tailored to his people’s unique situation. I started writing a proposal.

Then I learned from the production manager MPF was behind schedule and she had thought we’d complete production on site, but we had trouble getting the computers through UK customs. Then one of the pilot trainers got sick and I had to step into delivery. The pilot computerized feedback was corrupted and, despite my waking the responsible HRI manager at 3:00 a.m. his time, I couldn’t get it resolved.

The proposal languished, written, but not typed because computers were being used for last minute production. Then the printer cartridges were spent. On Friday before we left I had the smudged and faint proposal delivered to Chris, which his PA called an “£800 thousand slap in the face.”

A PhD HRI consultant sold a £250 thousand scaled down version. I did British Airways work offsite over those two years but I was persona non grata at Heathrow until the last MPF program, when I was invited back to observe.

The “it aint easy” lesson began to be etched behind my eyes.

I say “began” because over my career I fell in the “easy” trap a few times. Already overloaded I failed to recognize the “straw that breaks the camel’s back” phenomenon. I was working on a big project, but one where I had done something similar before, and failed to take differences in context into account. Or I didn’t create slack in a schedule for Murphy’s Law (“whatever can go wrong, will go wrong”). Eventually, I learned to stop when I heard myself say, Oh, it’ll be easy.”

“Consulting ain’t easy.”

“Consulting ain’t easy” because you are helping leaders and their organizations change. Whether it is  “getting everyone on the same page,” (integration), thinking up whole new products and services, or new ways to reach customers or get work done, (innovation), or getting better, faster, or cheaper to keep up with competition, (improvement), change is tough.

Individual change is tough enough. Quit smoking? Lose Weight? But when a whole group of individuals, an organization, must change together that is orders of magnitude more difficult.

During the British Airways project I witnessed change experts at work, Drs. George Litwin and Warner Burke among others. George and Warner discussed this project and sometimes I overheard and later joined discussions, as I worked behind George for ten years. These discussions evolved into the Burke-Litwin Model of Organization Dynamics pictured above, and published as “A Causal Model of Organizational Performance and Change,” in the Journal of Management  in 1992.

This model shows why “consulting ain’t easy.” The model explains the many elements of how an organization works (the boxes) and the interactions and feedback mechanisms between them (the arrows). The day to day business (transactional elements) is dynamic enough, but when you wish to change an organization, you must start with the why of the change, which is often found in the interaction between the external environment and the organization, (transformational elements).

The Burke Litwin Model guided a lot of my work over my thirty-seven years in consulting. See Warner’s more complete explanation here.

Over the years, I observed consultants and leaders who thought they were smart enough to just “take people off payroll and let those remaining figure it out,” or automate without looking at underlying processes, or dictate change without explaining why. It never ended well.

In four years British Airways went from the worst customer service and profit, to the most profitable airline with the best customer service in the world. I was only involved to a small extent, but spent my consulting career looking for another project like BA.

“Consulting ain’t easy, but if you approach it with some discipline and visible fair process, it is possible to help a client deliver astounding results.

Traveling the Consulting Road: Career Wisdom for New Consultants, Candidates, and Their Mentors, contains the stories of my consulting mistakes and lessons learned and tools and methodologies for every stage of a consulting career. Purchase on multiple platforms by clicking here.