My flight from Montreal to Philadelphia was actually a bit early. We were on the ground at 7PM for a scheduled 7:30 arrival. However, the gate we were to use was occupied and the plane at the gate was having mechanical problems. You know the drill, we just sat there. The pilot did a good job keeping us informed and he even apologized for the “chaos,” and went on to say that he was begging, borrowing and even trying to steal a gate but there were none available. And as we sat there past our scheduled arrival time you could see people getting nervous, especially those making international connections.

Let’s go back to his comment that there were no gates available. I was in Philadelphia, they have lots of gates and many were open (yes, I know, other planes would use them later). What he was really saying was that there was no plan B. I know this wasn’t his fault and I am not pointing the finger at him but there is a clear lesson for all of us here, personally and professionally. When we operate at the extreme edge of our capacity and try to cram too much into our day or lives or business the potential for problems goes up exponentially.

You always need a plan B but that is even more important on days when you have alot going on and when you are operating at full capacity. The problem though is when you are at full capacity you have no capability to recover if something goes wrong. Not only do you not have a plan B, you couldn’t implement it if you wanted to.

We finally got off the flight a bit after 8PM. We sat on the plane for one-hour. People missed connections. I hope they had a plan B because I know the airline didn’t.

This is all very hard to do in our hyper society but if you are to be truly successful and operate at the highest possible level you must have plan B ready to go when you need it.

This entry was posted on Saturday, July 12th, 2008 at 2:21 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.