Ready to Turn a Crisis into a Competitive Advantage

When a global aircraft company was faced with the aftermath of 9/11, devasting the entire industry, their market collapsed. Fortunately, the senior manager of technology and innovation had been certified and advocated Simplexity throughout the company. He was one of seven in the top leadership team and knew he was the only one who was not an Optimizer or Implementer. His thinking style was Generator and Conceptualizer, and he feared that the others might rush to judgment and work on cost savings, such as firing people who weren’t needed to preserve short-term profits. He convinced the team to give the Simplexity process a try and began facilitating by asking the fact finding questions. As they diverged and converged, they were surprised at what they discovered, especially what they didn’t know and what they wished they knew. They again diverged and converged in problem definition and ended up with four unexpected How Might We challenges. These were derived from challenge mapping, using the why what’s stopping analysis, and resulted in a new innovation strategy. Teams of operational managers were assigned to tackle each one. The solutions that were implemented made the aircraft company even stronger as a result of the crisis. It not only recovered, but flourished in the long term, whereas many of its competitors did not.