Recently, two flights that were scheduled to land at Regan National around midnight had to abort their landing. They circled, regrouped and then were able to successfully land.
What happened? Well, no air traffic controllers responded from the local tower. Was the door locked with the air traffic controller outside or did they fall asleep? No one really knows quite yet. But the airlines had a plan B. They were able to communicate with another tower, 50 miles away and using their radar, they were able to come in and land safely at the airport.
My question for you is simply this, as an accountable leader; do you have a plan B? If you have a computer system installed in your business, is there a backup should you lose your data? That’s a plan B. Natural disaster strike, earthquake, tsunamis that can, not only disrupt your business directly as far as it impact where you live but it might disrupt your suppliers, it might disrupt your customers. So we need to be accountable to create a plan B.
Creating a plan B or a backup plan is a proactive rather than a reactive move and this is critical for successful leaders. So what goes into a plan B? First of all, we need to do an analysis of what’s happened, not only in our industry but in other industries in the past.
It’s really easy to learn from something that’s in the news this week but, we need to look deeper than that. We need to look at what the possible things that can go wrong are with the disturbances in our product life cycle and what the supply chain could be, that could cause problems so that we’re unable to provide to our clients. Maybe it could be problems with telecommunications, it could be problems with the internet but we need to stop and see what sorts of problems or challenges can we run into.
