If everyone involved does their job, how is it that air cargo still breaks down from time to time? Irma van Buuren, this week’s guest author for CargoForwarder Global, explores this phenomenon in more detail.*** Cargo does not respect organizational boundaries, she says.
A shipment is booked. The forwarder delivers the cargo on time. The handler receives it within the agreed cut-off. The airline has accepted the booking. The truck arrives as planned. The documentation is complete.
And yet the shipment misses the flight.
Who failed?
The obvious answer is to look for the organization that did not do its job. But what if every organization performed within its agreed responsibility and the shipment still failed?
Then the problem is what happened between those responsibilities.
Air cargo is built around multiple organizations, each with its own processes, systems, contracts, service levels and KPIs. That creates clarity about who is responsible for what.
However, the shipment does not experience those boundaries. It experiences one continuous movement: A booking becomes a physical shipment. Information becomes a handling decision. One organization’s timing becomes another organization’s constraint, and a decision in one part of the chain can remove the options available in another.
Everyone can do their job and yet the shipment can still fail.
And that raises a more difficult question:
What is actually producing the outcome?
The organization is not the operation. A process can be perfectly clear and still depend on conditions that nobody owns end-to-end.
The cargo has to arrive. The documentation has to be correct. The shipment has to be visible in the system. The right people and resources have to be available. Information has to arrive at the right moment. The handover has to happen before the available time disappears.
While each condition may sit comfortably within someone’s responsibility, the outcome depends on all of them being true at the same time.
Information arriving late can delay a decision.
A delayed decision can leave cargo waiting.
Cargo waiting can consume the margin available for the next handover.
Nothing necessarily went wrong within an individual process. The conditions simply stopped lining up.
We are very good at asking: Who was responsible for this step?
We are much less accustomed to asking: What did the shipment depend on to move successfully?
The shipment experiences one system. The organizations experience their parts of it.
The work nobody measures.
The most important intervention may be the one that keeps the KPI green.
The system says one thing, but someone knows not to trust it blindly. A shipment looks ready, but someone knows that something is missing. A connection is still technically achievable, but someone calls ahead because they know how quickly the margin can disappear.
In all these situations, a problem has not yet occurred, but someone intervenes because they have seen it before. And when that happens, the exception never becomes visible. The KPI stays green. Nothing appears to be wrong.
A problem has been avoided but was not identified by the formal process. The KPI did not flag it. The data did not capture it.
Experience did.
The value and pitfall of experience.
Experienced people adjust, anticipate and connect things that the formal process does not. They know where to look twice, when to intervene, and whom to call. And because they do, the weakness remains invisible.
That creates a dangerous possibility: The organization may believe it has a resilient process when it actually has a human dependency. And the consequences of this may only become visible when the people, volume or conditions change.
What happens when volume grows?
The mechanism that keeps an operation stable at one scale can become the source of fragility at another.
Growth does not simply add shipments. It adds interactions. More shipments create more handovers, which then create more dependencies. More dependencies create more opportunities for variability, and more variability creates more need for coordination.
At lower volumes, experienced people can often absorb that complexity. They know where to intervene. They know what matters, and they know whom to call. The operation continues to perform.
But the underlying dependency grows with the volume, as there are more situations to anticipate, more exceptions to absorb, more decisions to make, and more informal coordination to sustain.
And then people leave.
Those who remain absorb more of the load. They carry more of the knowledge, make more interventions, and become more critical to keeping the operation moving.
The KPI may remain green, however, the dependency has increased.
Eventually, the question is no longer whether experienced people can keep up. It is whether the operating model can function without requiring them to. What worked before may simply no longer work at the next level.
That is when an organization discovers that the capability it relied on may not scale at all.
Accountability is not the same as control
An organization can own the outcome without controlling everything that produces it.
When something goes wrong, we naturally ask: Who was responsible?
But accountability is distributed while the outcome is shared. Accountability tells us who owns a responsibility. It does not necessarily tell us who controls the conditions required for the outcome.
Leadership can therefore see every organization performing acceptably while the system connecting them becomes increasingly fragile.
That is a very different risk.
Look beyond the organizational boundaries
If the outcome crosses organizational boundaries, looking only inside each organization will always leave part of the story out. So, the questions have to change.
Not only: Who is responsible?
But: What does this outcome depend on?
And perhaps the most revealing question: What are experienced people doing every day that the organization has never formally accounted for?
These questions expose what conventional performance reporting can easily miss. That is where much of the real performance is being produced, and it may also be where much of the real exposure sits.
Everyone can do their job. The system can still fail
The most dangerous weakness in an operation may be the one its performance indicators are successfully hiding.
Air cargo has become increasingly sophisticated at defining roles, processes, standards and responsibilities. That is necessary. However, clarity of responsibility does not create end-to-end control.
The shipment still has to cross the boundaries those structures create – and that is where the real test lies. Not in whether each organization can perform its part, but in whether the parts continue to work together under the conditions in which the operation actually runs. Because the interfaces are not simply where things go wrong. They are where the system reveals itself.
So, perhaps the industry question is not: How can we improve air cargo performance?
Perhaps the more important question is: What does your operation depend on, that your performance reporting cannot see?
Because that may be where the real exposure begins.
By Irma van Buuren
Independent Executive Advisor
The Executive Advisor and Founder of Executive Control draws on three decades of experience across aviation, working at the intersection of strategy, governance and operations. Having held senior leadership roles dealing with complex environments where operational success depends on multiple organizations and functions working together, she offers insight into the bigger picture – beyond the one illustrated by performance indicators and process responsibilities. Cargo does not respect organizational boundaries, she says.
