It's Time for Boeing to Call a Cab

When the Spaceliner took off on its inaugural flight to the International Space Station on June 5th, I imagine leaders at Boeing had hoped the momentous event would enable them to finally turn the page on the company’s recent troubled history.? Now, almost two months later, with the craft’s return voyage suspended indefinitely and its crew still circling the globe, yet another malfunction has added even more distressing pages to what must now feel like an endless chapter. ?Boeing can’t seem to catch a break.

For any manufacturing business, repeat malfunctions are a challenge.? Product dependability is vital to their success.? But Boeing isn’t just any manufacturing business.? Its malfunctions put lives at risk.? As result, and whether it realizes it or not, Boeing isn’t in the aircraft or spacecraft building business; it is in the certainty business.? Malfunctions represent an existential risk. To survive, the company must ensure passengers feel certain they will land safely at their destination.? Always.

In the work that I do as a researcher, I describe Boeing as a company that operates a “Passenger Seat” business.? It runs a business where its customers have no control but require high certainty.

And even the image above isn’t completely accurate. ?For passengers to board a flight, they must feel absolutely certain.? Given the catastrophic consequences of failure, the odds of it occurring must be so small as to be easily overlooked and ignored.? As a business, Boeing must remain on the right edge of the lower right box of the Confidence Quadrant.

I raise all of this because very soon, the leaders of Boeing will need to make an existential decision.? Does the Starliner bring its crew back to Earth, or does Boeing ask SpaceX to do so for it?

I don’t think it is a hard choice: Boeing must call Elon Musk.

Here’s why.

The best-case scenario for Boeing is that the Starliner returns safely with its crew.? When that happens, everyone will breathe a sigh of relief.? But appreciate that will be the response: Boeing didn’t fail.? Even though it will be an extraordinary feat of engineering, what the crowd will see isn’t the extreme achievement, but the absence of further misfortune.? Boeing didn’t fail.? That’s the upside.

While I don’t wish for it, the worst-case scenario is that the Starliner doesn’t return safely, and its crew perishes.? In that case, not only will Boeing have failed, but in the mind of the crowd, it will have failed again.? Moreover, it will have failed to succeed at the thing that matters most: delivering certainty.? Coming on top of the company’s other recent mishaps, such an event could easily trigger a crisis in confidence from which Boeing cannot recover.? A Starliner failure could easily bring down the company's commercial aircraft business as well.

You see, trust is like a tall Lego tower.? It takes a long time to build, but it can be destroyed quickly.? Like it or not, the back-to-back Max Series crashes, paired with the company’s evasive response to them and the recent Alaskan Airlines door incident, not only destroyed confidence but prevented the rebuilding process from beginning.? Five years on, trust in Boeing is still precariously low.? Given that backdrop, choosing to introduce further vulnerability is reckless.

Boeing management may feel that linking what happens in its space division with what happens in its commercial aircraft division is an overreach.? Space travel has always represented far greater risk.? Moreover, this is the Starliner’s first flight. Its commercial aircraft have millions - if not billions - of miles of demonstrated success.

While I wish those facts might matter, should another incident occur, what the crowd will know for certain is Boeing failed again.? More troubling is the likelihood the crowd will conclude that Boeing will fail again.? Yet another data point will enable the crowd to extrapolate a deeply troubling trend.

For all these reasons, now is not the time for Boeing leadership to take the risk.? Yes, calling Elon Musk and asking for a ride may be embarrassing, if not outright humiliating, but it is the far better choice here.

Until trust is rebuilt, companies must work relentlessly to avoid creating further vulnerability.? Calling on SpaceX for help would demonstrate that Boeing management understands that.

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Peter Atwater is an adjunct lecturer in the Economics Department at William & Mary and the author of The Confidence Map: Charting a Path from Chaos to Clarity. He works with individuals, business leaders, and public policymakers to help them better appreciate the role confidence plays in decision-making.