“We call it the ‘Distraction Technique’. It’s beautifully simple. You find a subject or an idea that’s topical in some way. Then you get a group of people excited by it. It must be so all consuming that it eclipses other ideas that could (and probably should) legitimately be included in the conversation. And voila! You and your issues become invisible”.
Speaking in conspiratorial tones MAG revealed that there are some serious gurus of the Distraction Technique out there. Alarmingly, the crème de la crème of distractors are able to ensure the meeting rooms they occupy attain a ‘Lala-land Mindstate’, described as a sort of hypnotic bliss that dominates the mood of the room with a comforting acceptance of the status quo and the tried and tested.
“There’s this one Flying Elephant, he’s a legend. We call him ‘The Airport Architect’. This guy is the master of Distraction Technique. He is responsible for distracting meetings about airport architecture and design. In the blink of an eye he can get a meeting distracted by lofty architectural speak, vain glorious visions and bewitched by technical distractions like aircraft movements, PAX capacities, engineering details, traffic forecasts etc. It’s Lala-land nirvana in there and he’s able to get all sorts of stuff ignored which means you’ll usually find loads of Flying Elephants packing the corners of airport architect’s meeting rooms”.
At this point in our conversation the mood grew pensive.
MAG elaborated some concerns “But times are changing, architectural discussions used to be a good place for us Flying Elephants to be properly ignored. Typically, we’d be confident of getting a good crowd of us and we’d get great invisibility in there. I remember one time there was me (MAG), Digital Disrupter, Future Shopper and Passenger Experience packing the room corners out. And it was going great for a while, meaning perfect distraction where nobody’s really talking about our issues except with some good sounding lip service stuff”.
“But then I was like ‘Hey! Watch out! There’s some gate crashers come in yapping on about ‘omnichannel’, ‘commercial optimisation’ and ‘falling conversion rates’. Then some crazy person jabbered something about ‘digital disruption’. And that was it, total madness. It got very exposing in there for a while. Fortunately for us The Airport Architect was able to masterfully eclipse the room’s conversation with some distracting architectural voodoo”.
It seems that this experience has revealed an uncomfortable truth for the Flying Elephants. They realise that Digital Disruption is increasingly a weak link in the elephant team, struggling with a poor Distraction Technique and is widely blamed for allowing uninvited ideas about digital disruption into a plethora of aviation conversations. One example is the sudden attention on Trinity’s corner of the room. Faced with increasing chatter about a so called ‘quad-rinity’ and other digitally driven game changers Trinity has responded gamefully with distracting ideas around the theme of ‘collaboration and partnerships’.
