Plane Conversations

I have a proposition for you.  How about you climb into an aluminum tube and go hurtling through the air at 500 miles an hour?  How about you have no control over who you sit next to for several hours and how about you pay several hundred dollars for the experience?  Not so much, right?

Then, why do people take air mass-transit? Why do they spend the money to go through the experience – sometimes pleasant and at other times very frustrating – of boarding an aircraft to go somewhere? Why not go by another means of transportation like automobile or bus or train? Why even go at all?

I know this sounds like a dumb question because the answer should be obvious.

Of course, the purpose of travel is to go see someone or something, perhaps to experience something new or perhaps to build a business or personal relationship. We have some goal that we cannot accomplish at home; so, unless we can bring the destination to us, we have to travel to get there.

When we get past the whys of travel and get to the methods, things get a little hazier.

Why do people travel by airline? I have to believe that people chose to go by air because they value their time.  They believe that air travel will help them make the best use of their time, allowing them to spend more of it at their destination and less of it getting there.  That makes sense since aircraft are faster than cars or trains or buses, right?  In theory, yes.  In reality, often, no.

Once, traveling by air was perhaps the most glamorous and efficient way to travel.  Airlines served our purpose of getting there faster.  Are they still serving that purpose?

All of the evidence suggests that each year they take a little longer to get us there. In other words, airline travel is slowing down – not speeding up - as a mode of travel. Airline travel is losing efficiency and is falling further and further short of fulfilling its purpose. 

In an economy that is driven by constant demands for increased productivity, is it any wonder that the market is unwilling to pay the airlines a profitable price for their service?

Now, in defense of the airline industry, they do not have total control over the efficiency of their service. Since airlines have been targeted by terrorists more  than every other form of transportation, the industry is subject to the government’s ability to provide security to the traveling public.  Airlines are also subject to constraints in the traffic flow system – the freeways in the air are clogged and the technology to increase traffic flow has not kept up with the demand. In essence, we are trying to push big city traffic through a two-lane highway. We have the technology; but, we haven’t built the new eight lane freeway the traffic volume requires.

So, the  problems that reduce the efficiency of the air transportation system are not for the airlines to solve alone. All of the stakeholders in the game must figure it out.  

For airlines to be a viable part of the future transportation system, the problems must be solved. Otherwise, our economy will be to unable to reap the full benefits of new innovation and increases in productivity.

The sooner the better, if this economy is to sustain long-term growth.

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The solution to any problem is entirely dependent on how the problem is defined. Likewise, redefining the problem, exposes huge opportunities for new solutions.

In Fact, a great deal of innovation arises not from a clever solution, but from a clever new definition of a problem.

For example, “build a better mouse trap” has entirely different outcome when one simply changes the definition of the word “trap”.

Manufacturing Problems.

Commercial Air Transportation, for example, was once lauded as a “Time Machine” because airplanes could carry a person into “a future”  that was otherwise impossible to emerge in, or to a “past” that would never have been witnessed by any other means.

However, solving this problem created many more problems such as runways, infrastructure, car parking, noise, oxygen, crashing, etc.  Diligently, we went about solving those problems as well.  Unfortunately, solving each of those problems created a host of new problems. Today we’re down to solving the 3.0 ounce of toothpaste rule and the flammable underwear problem.

At some point we need to ask if we are manufacturing problems with every new solution.  At what point is innovation taking us backwards? How prevalent is this human trait and does it have anything to do with the financial deficit?

Redefine the Problem

One of the greatest opportunities of Social Media (which is rarely cited by the experts) is the opportunity to redefine problems in the context of social media.  Using our airline example, we know that  commercial aviation arose from WWII as a response for bringing troops to static battle fields with such dynamic machines as the DC3. This worked great after the war too!

Today we still treat people as static and airplanes as dynamic.  Suppose we were to redefine the problem so that people are dynamic and the airplane is static?

Think about it, people go about their life with work, family, and friends.  Then they hop into a long aluminum tube, tie themselves down and sit there doing nothing.  After a few hours, they emerge from the tube to go about their life, work, family, and friends. The aluminum tube is static, not dynamic – it’s a time machine, remember?

The opportunity, therefore, is for people to self-aggregate using social media around locations, schedules, and events related to life, work, family, and friends.   The market could then supply the correct size aluminum tube to meet the need of the community. After all, wouldn’t it be easier to move one airplane to meet the ‘market of many’ rather than trying to move the ‘market of many’ to meet one airplane?

This may sound trivial now, but don’t underestimate the creativity of social entrepreneurs to build a better problem to solve.

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