- Leandro Herrero - https://leandroherrero.com -

From airplane cabin temperature control: warmer to sleep, colder to awake. A culture thermostat lesson for organizations.

Temperature control of the cabin is used by airlines in transatlantic flights as a way to change behaviour. It may not be articulated like that! Oh, the comfort of passengers, of course. Sure.

But if you want to get more sleepy people (less requests for that extra coffee, and less annoying questions about the dysfunctional flight entertainment system) all you have to do is to increase the cabin temperature. I don’t know how much of that they do but I assume a couple of degrees up would do it. Come the time for serving and eating, you want as many people awake as possible. Temperature down wakes them up , even those in cosy premium seats.

Behavioural change by temperature, that’s it.

The organizational and business analogies would be simplistic but perhaps powerful. If you have a sleepy organization (in metaphoric terms) you may want to inject some cool air to wake up. In fact the famous ‘burning platform’ is perhaps more a freezing platform.

Think in these analogical terms. How can we wake up people, all of us, perhaps from that long siesta? Imagine yourself at the front of the airplane by the cabin temperature control panel. Imagine turning down the numbers. What would be your equivalent?

Think waking up, but don’t mistake waking up with injecting stress and anxiety. Those can still weak up people but, after a threshold, will block them.

Also,the famous burning platform of ‘change management’ assumes injecting sense of urgency (because the lack of it) which usually is translated into ‘the sky is falling’. The possibly original burning platform was an oil platform in flames that left not room for thinking and the person jumped into the sea. Behind the burning platform model is survival instincts.

But if we leave things untouched until survival kicks in, you may be in a sad state of affairs. And late, very late. Don’t wait for a crisis. Our Reboot! accelerator [1] has also that wake up functionality and we use it all the time in organizations that are not necessarily in any type of crisis. Other initiatives may be also useful.

As leader, watch your organizational thermostat.

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