Corporate half-truths don’t cut it

“Flight 123 to XYZ is delayed due to operational reasons. We regret any inconvenience caused.”

How many times have you heard this? How many times have you sighed, rolled your eyes, or muttered in frustration? This phrase, uttered in monotonous tones over crackling airport speakers all over the world, is one of the great corporate half-truths of our time. It’s a masterclass in saying something while saying nothing.

Before we break it down, however, let’s insert an important caveat. Running an airline is brutally difficult. You’re managing thousands of employees, fleets of expensive machines, intricate schedules, unpredictable weather, and demanding regulatory requirements. Every day and in every flight, all of those elements combine to cause potential chaos. Aviation is one of the most complex industries in existence. I always feel great respect for those who take it on.

But “operational reasons” doesn’t cut it. It sounds technical, neutral, unavoidable. It makes you think of intricate logistics, last-minute complexities, forces beyond human control. It’s a useful phrase because it discourages further questioning. The reality? It often masks systemic mismanagement, poor planning, and avoidable inefficiencies.

Many delays are not due to acts of God but acts of human incompetence. A lack of spare aircraft, poor contingency planning, last-minute crew shortages, mismanaged maintenance schedules—these are “operational reasons.” In other words, failures of foresight and execution. When airlines cut corners on staffing or fail to build enough flexibility into their schedules, passengers pay the price. When leadership doesn’t prioritize reliability, delays become routine. When corporate governance failures from the top bedevil operations, those to blame are not the frontline staff. When company culture is focused more on making life easier for senior executives than for customers, expect much mediocrity in service.

If an airline is habitually running late, it’s not the fault of “operations”—it’s the fault of how those operations are funded and managed.

Then comes the second half of the announcement: “We regret any inconvenience caused.”

Do you? Do you really? Because regret, if genuine, is followed by action. If you regret something, you change your behaviour. You fix the problem. You make sure it doesn’t happen again. If an airline keeps issuing the same regrets day after day, year after year, it’s not regretting—it’s just reciting. Regret without resolution is just an empty ritual, a mechanical nod to customer frustration with no real intent to improve.

Airlines that truly regret their service failures don’t just apologize; they overhaul. They analyze why delays keep happening and put measures in place to reduce them. They invest in better scheduling software, hire enough crew, keep backup planes ready, and rethink their approach to customer experience. They don’t just issue robotic regrets over an aged PA system—they take responsibility and act.

Every time an airline runs late, it steals something irreplaceable from its passengers: time. A delayed flight is not just a minor inconvenience. It’s missed meetings, disrupted holidays, lost sleep, family reunions cut short. It’s hours spent pacing terminals, staring at departure boards, waiting in endless queues, drained by uncertainty.

Airlines exist in a service industry. Their customers are not just passengers—they are people entrusting them with their most valuable resource: time. When delays become the norm rather than the exception, it’s not just an inconvenience; it’s a fundamental failure of the contract between a corporation and its customers.

No one expects perfection, and I’m not here to bash airlines alone this week. Aviation is too complex, too intertwined with the forces of nature, for everything to run smoothly 100% of the time. But customers do and should expect a relentless pursuit of improvement. 

Whatever your line of business, you’re in the trust business. Airlines don’t just operate airplanes; banks don’t just operate branches; telcos don’t just operate base stations. They all operate trust. They should invest in resilience, redundancy, and readiness. They shouldn’t wait for customers to complain—they should prevent problems before they occur. They shouldn’t just regret failures—they should make them rare.

Investing in the repeated broadcasting of half-truths hides the real truth: that we might be failing to invest in making those pronouncements unnecessary. I am always suspicious of corporates that have too big a budget on communications and PR. It’s the easy place to spend money. The harder one is to get the basic work of strategy, governance, execution, and delivery right. When companies lean on empty language instead of fixing underlying problems, they signal that surface-level optics matter more than the fundamentals of doing good work.

The real work of a corporation is not in PR statements, damage control, or well-crafted apologies. It’s in the depth of its preparation, the rigour of its execution, and the sincerity of its commitment to customers. A great business is not defined by how well it explains away failure, but by how rarely it has to. Excellence is not in the messaging—it’s in the doing.

A great reputation comes not from how well you cover missteps, but from how seldom they happen. The strongest brands aren’t masters of spin—they’re masters of substance. Which companies do you as a customer support with fond loyalty? Not the spinmeisters, but those that simply work, without excuses.

(Sunday Nation, 16 February 2025)

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