The worldwide airline crisis resulting from the volcano has the airlines reaching for their crisis management plans. As we speak, it is estimated the industry is losing $218 million per day. Yikes.

What we  can learn from the airlines as they try to adapt their daily operations to an unforeseeable, significant event, is the value of strong contingency planning.

We have seen Qantas contingency plans unfold over the last few days.

• Provisional rescheduling followed by no rescheduling once it was realised that the situation would not resolve quickly.
• Hotels were booked for stranded passengers to wait it out wherever they were “trapped”.
• The biggest challenge will be managing the backlog once flights resume. We have seen the airlines firstly asking people to delay any planned travel for the next few months.
• And yesterday, a statement to the effect that no new bookings were going to be taken. To help people feel more ok about that, the papers published proposed airfares for an economy ticket to the UK, estimated to be around AUD $12,000. Now that’s an incentive to stay home.

I imagine plenty more contingencies have been discussed behind the boardroom doors that outsiders aren’t privy to.

Contingency planning forces you to decide what you’ll do in a worst case scenario. It’s familiar territory in change planning as well.

In my experience things rarely go exactly as planned. They are usually more complex and less succcesful. Not always, but often. Effective change  planning includes planning for alternate outcomes to ones you expect. 

Benefits:

• The time you spend up front is time saved later when you need to implement your contingency plan
• It forces you to question your assumptions about the expected results
• contingency planning gives other people comfort that you are thinking through all possibilities

If you never need to pull  your contingency plans out of the drawer, all well and good. But if you do, then you’re ready with a process and approach to deal with most outcomes.

contingency plan is to