Do you treat your Members as Passengers in an Airport or as Family

I have the "pleasure" of travelling a significant part of the year for business and so have a unique appreciation of airports and their foibles.  Some of you who may appreciate some insights that one of Seth Godin's recent blogs triggered for me.

As a leader in an organisation that deals with youth in clearly defined age groups, there is a temptation to treat them as passengers passing through an airport, a necessary, but ultimately irritating temporary engagement.

So to paraphrase Seth, there are so many things we can learn from what they (airports) do wrong:

1. No one is (visibly) in charge. The airport doesn’t appear to have a CEO, and if it does, you never see them, hear about them or interact with them in any way. When the person at the top doesn’t care, it filters down to what the members / passengers experience.  What's worse is that when they get special treatment when they engage with the system they don't understand what everyone is complaining about.   Unless the management suffers the positive and negative ramifications of the rules they promulgate, how do they know if the changes they make are positive for the organisation.
2. Problems persist because organizations defend their turf instead of embracing and tackling the problem. The middle manager (DC) blames the operations (Group) people, who blame someone else, and around and around. Only when the member’s problem is the driver of organisational behaviour (as opposed to people attempting to maintain power or the status quo) do things change.
3. The organisational offering (think about all those little stores offering items no one buys in airports or in our case the Scout and Cub Programme)  is aimed squarely at the (disappearing) average of the market. People who like fancy luggage and expensive shirts never have a problem finding something to buy at an airport, but when can you find a package of panado’s or a toothbrush?   Apparently, organisations haven’t realized that we’re all lot more used to being able to get ultimate variation in offerings and have come to expect it from everyone.  The average Joe has gone and we have a million different people in his / her place all clamouring for what they need.
4.  Airports see customers, as sometimes does Scouting its members, as powerless transients. Hey, you’re going to be gone tomorrow, but the organisation will still be here, so your opinion is of less than any value.  Besides you are one of a hundred possible members/customers so why should we value you?
5. By removing spare capacity, airlines create failure. In order to increase profit, airlines work hard to get the maximum number of flights out of each plane, each day. As a result, there are no spares, no downtime and no resilience. By assuming that their customer base prefers to save money, not anxiety, they create an anxiety-filled system.  We take our volunteer base and try to minimise the people in our support structure and try to maximise the people who are supported by them.  We figure that a more efficient service support is “better” for the people on the ground, and sometimes lose sight of the comfort that is lost as we lost the visible people of the support structure for the groups on the ground.
6. The Organisational leadership is ruled by superstition and rumour, not fact. They often act without data and put on a quite serious but ultimately useless bit of theatre to support these. These rumours and beliefs become the reality of the organisation despite the glaring gaps between these and the facts on the ground.
7. The ad hoc is forbidden. Imagine an airplane employee bringing in an extension cord and a power strip to deal with the daily occurrence of travellers hunched in the corner around a single outlet. Impossible – it will never happen. There is a bias in most organisations toward the permanent and improved, not the quick and effective.  Why do we not delegate power to make changes and the responsibility for those changes that are made?  Could it be that we don’t trust the people we appoint?  These actions say more about the organisation than about the people who work in it.
8.  Everyone is treated the same. Effective organizations treat different people differently. While there’s some window dressing at the edges (I’m thinking of slightly faster first class lines and slightly more convenient motorized cars for seniors), in general, airports insist that the one size they’ve chosen to offer fit all.  We all believe in the fairness of dumbing down the system to provide the same standards to every member, but are the needs of a group that serves youth without parents the same as those of a group that has an active and committed parent body?  Does a group of members in the deep rural areas require the same support and systems that a group in a modern urbanised suburb does?  Clearly not and yet we insist on one size fits all.
9. There are plenty of potential bad surprises, but no good ones. You can have a flight be cancelled, be strip searched or even go to the wrong airport. But all possibility for delight has been removed. It wouldn’t take much to completely transform the experience from a chore to a delight.   When was the last time you were delighted by an organisation that actually made your life easier?  What have you done to delight and surprise the people who you support?
10. No one is having any fun. Most people who work at airports have precisely the same demeanour as people who work at a cemetery.   How often have you heard of adult members delighting in the programme they are going to run on Friday evening - it happens but its rare!   When did volunteering become a chore, a job that had to be done, instead of fun for both the adult and the youth members?  I would argue that this is partially that we have lost the community of scouting were we can share our joys and our successes – let’s take a leaf for the cub scouters – for most of them scouting is a game writ large.
11. Lastly Airports and many scout groups are sterile. Everyone who passes through leaves no trace, like every morning starts anew. There are no connections between people, either fellow passengers or the staff. No one says, “welcome back,” and that’s honest, because no one feels particularly welcome.   When a cub goes up to the troop, or a scout finishes and wants to come back either as a Rover or a Scouter, who goes out of their way to make that person feel like they belong and that their on-going committee and contribution is valued?

If we don’t take a lesson from this we as Scouting run the risk of mistaking our (one time and long passed) market domination for a you-have-no-choice monopoly.  And make no mistake there are hundreds of choices out there including people just staying at home.  If we are looking for merely reliable, predictable outcomes, we are losing sight of our actual goal which should be motivating and enabling our members to realise their full potential and excel.  

So next time you sit down to write that Friday programme consider this, when the kids go home will they have had an airport experience or feel like they are leaving a warm family environment.  The choice to make this a reality is in your hands.