When you have around 10,000 passengers camped at the airport and 4,000 flights cancelled, you can say that you have a crisis management situation on your hands. This was the case back in December for BAA, when something like a day of snow pretty much brought Heathrow to a standstill for four days. Now three months down the line the BAA leadership has come out with a couple of issues that they believe contributed to the crisis that dominated front pages of national newspapers for almost a week...

And, no great surprise, the report explained that a breakdown in communication was one of the main factors leading up to the crisis. In fact, the leadership at BAA blamed “confusing and contradictory messages” as well as internal communication failures.

This sounds like total organisatonal meltdown, because communication goes wrong when the structure of the company becomes frail, no-one knows who they are reporting to, what messages they are supposed to relay, and when.

BAA has come out with its hands up, put together a report that outlines the problems it faced back in December and is working hard to put things right, but it will take some time.

This is far more than a report for annoyed passengers to read and feel a small moral victory, it is an organisational handbook of how things can go horribly wrong when the right processes are not in place and vital communication messages are lost in translation.

Leadership development programmes are invested in by organisations looking to combat situations like these, because these in-depth programmes have the power to transform thinking within companies, and bring absolute clarity to teams and individuals.

Please, let BAA be a shining example to us all.

James Pentreath