"Rituals in an Empty Airport": Watch for a Common Business Mistake

Once upon a time, in a remote corner of the Pacific...

Natives saw enormous birds landing on the island. Strange people came out of them unloaded crates, and started distributing food and precious objects. These were, actually, American military airplanes that were bringing a team to build a temporary air base. But the natives, who could not know better, thought that these were Gods from heaven, and they had come just to help them.

And one day, the Gods were gone and the bonanza was over. Naturally, the inhabitants of the island were nostalgic of the good times, but they didn't know what to do. They resorted to prayer. But one day, somebody had a brilliant idea: they were going to build a new landing strip, complete with control tower! And the Gods would hear their prayer and they would come back! And so they got to work, and worked very hard to build an airfield. It was a good airfield, like in their memories, complete with control tower. But despite their busy rituals, the airport remained empty: the Gods had abandoned them. And one day, they felt apathetic about it, so they completely forgot about it.

The Fallacy of the Empty Airport

Anthropologists called this phenomenon Cult of the Cargo, in reference to the cargo of these airplanes. What was really happening in their minds? Offhand we could say that there was of course, lack of technical knowledge and technical skills, so they did not get it right.

But there was another, very insidious psychological phenomenon.

They thought "if we put an airfield there there will be airplanes" and they hoped for years that airplanes would return. Sadly, it was the other way round: "if there are airplanes there will be airports." Airports are there for airplanes. Sometimes you might see a (small) airplane without an airport. But if you see an airport and never airplanes landing and taking off, something is obviously wrong!

The fallacy is that the natives saw a consequence (the airport) and thought it would be the cause of the gods coming back in airplanes to bring them food. Of course, it was a gross reasoning error. The islanders should have aimed for the airplanes, not the airport -- since if they had managed to convince the foreign people to come back with airplanes, they would have taken care of the airport anyway.

A Misconception Typical of "Primitive Societies"?

You might want to say "pfft... primitive societies!" But before dismissing that form of thinking as "preposterous", please think again: could it that the globalized business community of this early 21st century has some features of a "primitive society"?

In fact, this form of Cargo Cult thinking is quite prevalent. I remember, in the early 2010s there was a rage about Six Sigma in the services industry. Six Sigma was wonderful, it was going to increase productivity. Some business consultants had seen how the manufacturing industry was measuring items out of the production line and were checking there average characteristics, as well as the standard deviation, and they had decided that the deviation should be kept at a minimum. This was good and no rocket science (just common sense and arithmetics).

But then this method was brought over to the financial industry. "So far, so good, I thought, so what items are we going to measure out of the production line to find the average and deviation?". Much to my dismay, I discovered two things:

• There would be no measure of anything (what the heck did they want to calculate the deviation of?).
• There was not even a notion of a production line! Business process modeling was deficient to say the least.

So the people who prouldy went around with their colored "belts", were no better than the islanders of the Pacific who were mimicking the ground staff of a make-believe airfield, and making signals to non-existent airplanes. As could be expected, the "business improvement" projects came to nothing; eventually everybody became apathetic and they forgot about it.

Of course, there is nothing wrong with Six Sigma, as there is nothing wrong with airplanes. The problem is the primitive thinking of people who think that if they perform elaborate rituals, they will magically get the Real McCoy.

That's how ineffective rituals will result in an empty airport... together with a feeling of having been abandoned by the Gods.

Other Examples

There are many other examples of the Cargo Cult "rituals" that lead to the "empty airport":

1. Organize elections in a country and there will be democracy. Calling elections without first establishing the foundations of a democratic society, wil lead to an empty "ritual". The "empty airport" is that (with luck) there will be a new dictatorship; otherwise, a failed state.
2. Bring the new XYZ banking package (or ERP, etc.) and your staff will improve the way they work. A good piece of software will make things easier if people do things right in the first place. But if the business processes are not proper, a new software will just produce errors and deadlocks faster! The "ritual" is a migration project, and the "empty airport" is a new package with no significant productivity gain. First fix your processes with your current package, and then decide if you want to migrate!
3. Call a bank a "Fintech" and it will become a leaner company. A name will not change the way people work and mentalities. The "ritual" is going through a self-suggestion process; the "empty airport" is that your bank will be just as traditional as it ever was, and staff will feel kind of silly. That's the other way round: first work hard to create a financial high-tech company, and then you will deserve to call it a FinTech!
4. Get yourself an ISO process certification and your customer satisfaction will improve. The "ritual" is the certification process, and the "empty airport" is that the clients are as unhappy as ever, but now they are unhappy in a consistent way. Find how to improve your customer satisfaction, make it into a process, and then get your ISO certification!

What Did You Observe?

So we have been all affected, to some degree by this "ritual" form of thinking. Of course, people who live on Public Relations like politicians absolutely love Cargo Cults. Even in Europe, where you sometimes you get "white elephant" projects that actually result in a empty airport, like Ciudad Real in Madrid!

If you want to make a little practice, go around in your company and find an "empty airport" and then find the "ritual": some wonderful innovation, an there is this strong (and somewhat blind) faith that it will solve some problem, and yet the result is not there and it will obviously not be there in a predictable future.

And then find the Cargo Cult: what is the consequence (the airport) that they are focused on, instead of facing and fixing the cause (the airplanes)?

Have you noticed other examples? Let me know.