On a recent flight to New York, I, Theresa, and about 30 passengers were settling in for a short, uneventful flight. Suddenly, a ground attendant announces, “Our count is off, we need everyone to get out their IDs so that we can check them.” Mind you, it is getting close to take-off time so we were all compliant hoping the problem would be quickly resolved. We all pulled out our IDs and the attendant began to call off each person’s name. When finished, she said “that’s only 30 passengers and the flight attendants have counted 31.” So the ground and flight crews conferred and began to go up and down the aisle checking IDs. Then they started to call out the names again. At this point, now 15 minutes pass take-off time, we, the passengers, began saying in chorus, “why don’t you ask if anyone’s name wasn’t called?” The ground attendant looked at her co-workers, picked up the microphone and asked, “Is there anyone I didn’t call?” Immediately, a gentleman in the middle of the plane raised his hand saying “you didn’t call me.”
Surely there is a lesson in this for all of us. One wonders how did the attendants miss such an obvious step in their process? But even more curious is why the gentleman whose name wasn’t called didn’t raise his hand to say his name was not called or why we, the passengers, could see the solution to the problem (it felt so obvious to us) and the attendants couldn’t?
Why 5 attendants couldn’t see the solution we, the passengers, saw I’ll never know but what I do know is that we were part of the solution, and they didn’t involve us in solving the problem. They followed their protocols, they talked amongst themselves, yet they didn’t involve those who were most impacted by the delay until we became so loud, they couldn’t ignore us.
I don’t know about you but I’ve certainly had those moments where it seemed like everyone around me knew what I should do, but for some reason I wasn’t ready or maybe willing to hear the answer. Often the answer was as clear as day and when I finally “saw” it, I couldn’t believe I had missed it.
Take a few minutes this week to think about the problems, issues, or situations you have before you. Ask yourself, “what am I not seeing about this situation?”, “what am I missing?” Often, distance, time and reflection are the best remedy for missing the obvious but sometimes, just asking someone else for input can save you a lot of time and energy.
