Stories for Work

Introduction

I once had the pleasure of working with a wonderful woman, Merrin Butler, who confessed to sleeping or reading through the safety instructions on her regular Sunday night flight from Dublin to Glasgow.

She told me that catching the same flight every week for work made her, understandably, very blasé. So she’d either fall asleep or read the paper as the crew pulled on oxygen masks and pointed out the exits.

One night on her regular flight, after giving her usual lack of attention to the pre-flight demonstration, they hit some rough weather and the pilot had to abort the landing as they were coming into Glasgow. The plane circled around and tried again, but the rain and wind were getting worse and so the pilot abandoned the landing for the second time. Before making the third attempt, the captain announced, ‘We’ll make one final attempt to land but before we do, the crew will go through our safety instructions again.’

All the passengers sat bolt upright in their seats, their undivided attention on the crew. People asked questions about the oxygen masks, checked for their life jackets under their seats and physically counted out the rows to their nearest exit.

Thankfully, Merrin lived to tell the frightening tale, as did everyone else on the plane.

When she shared this story with me, long after the incident, I was helping her to implement a major organisational change at National Australia Bank. It was going to be a two-year process that would affect all the Human ...