A disruption hits and the calendar fills up.
Weather. A crew constraint. A late inbound. A gate swap. A maintenance ripple. An ATC ground stop. Doesn’t matter what the trigger is — the pattern stays the same:
- everyone scrambles
- the same questions get asked in multiple places
- nobody fully trusts the updates
- meetings stack up
- the problem keeps moving anyway
People love to blame communication.
That’s not the real issue.
The meeting isn’t the work. It’s the workaround.
In travel and airline operations, disruptions expose the gap between what teams know, what teams can prove, and what teams can act on.
The meeting becomes the place where people try to rebuild a single version of the truth. Because the truth is scattered.
Ops has one system. Crew has another. Maintenance has another. Customer service has another. Station operations have another.
You can have the data and still have chaos if the data isn’t assembled into a timeline people trust.
Disruptions create a second job: coordination
The hidden labor in disruption isn’t solving the issue. It’s chasing the status of the issue.
Middle managers live this sentence:
“I’m accountable for keeping things moving, but I don’t own any of the tools.”
They become the human connector cable — hunting updates, translating between teams, forwarding screenshots, summarizing calls, sending follow-ups, keeping leadership calm, keeping teams aligned.
Meanwhile, the disruption mutates in real time. So the organization schedules another meeting.
Why “we’ll align in a quick sync” becomes the default
Meetings feel like progress because they produce talk. But the disruption doesn’t need talk. It needs ownership, a shared timeline, durable decisions, and escalation that works without debate.
When those things don’t exist, meetings become the only way to assign responsibility and confirm reality.
Ownership breaks at the seams
Disruptions cross boundaries fast. And boundaries are where ownership dies.
Inside a single team, work moves. Across teams, work turns into handoffs, status checks, permission seeking, and re-confirmation.
Those aren’t bad questions. They’re questions a system should answer without a calendar invite.
Why escalation feels slower than the problem
Escalation is still treated like a human ritual. Not a system behavior.
Risk gets noticed, verified, screenshot, discussed, escalated late, and summarized after the fact — while the situation keeps changing.
That’s why escalation can feel slower than the disruption itself.
“We have the data” is not the same as shared reality
Most travel ops teams have data. What they don’t have is one place where disruption context accumulates, decisions stick, and next actions stay owned.
So the organization compensates with meetings.
What to fix first
- Create one disruption timeline people trust.
- Make next action plus owner non-optional.
- Capture decisions where the work happens.
- Turn escalation into a step, not a conversation.
Do those four things and meetings drop naturally — because people stop needing calls to reconstruct reality.
The punchline
Ten meetings isn’t a productivity problem. It’s an ownership problem. A shared reality problem. A system problem.
Middle managers feel it first because they’re expected to keep things moving without owning the tools that would let them move.
FAQ
What is a Business Momentum System (BMS)?
A Business Momentum System is built to keep work moving. It sits before your CRM and before reporting tools. It focuses on follow-ups, handoffs, next actions, and the operational work that decides whether execution stalls.
Where does TODD fit?
TODD is our Business Momentum System. It reduces coordination drag by turning next actions into system behavior— so disruptions don’t automatically become ten meetings.
Do we have to replace our current tools?
No. Most teams keep their core systems and add a momentum layer that carries context, owners, and next actions forward— so your tools stop handing the work back to people.
Tyrone Showers