The airline industry is obsessed with key performance indicators (KPIs). Of all the metrics they track, perhaps the most important is on-time departure and arrival. 

The king of that metric currently is Delta Airlines. In the first quarter of 2024, Delta's flights arrived on time 83.61% of the time. In 2023, 82.6% of Delta's flights landed on time.

That KPI is so important that Delta one time hired a big-name consulting firm to come up with ways to improve on-time performance.  Some made sense. Some were impractical. Some didn’t really make much difference.

Around the same time, some front-line Delta employees came up with an idea of their own. You may not pay much attention to how most planes pull away from the gate on departure, but here’s the usual process. To get to the runway, a tug pushes the plane back away from the gate, then turns it 90 degrees so it's lined up with the taxiway. Then, the pilot turns on the engines, and the plane slowly taxis away.

But Delta's customer service agents and ground support people, asked an offbeat question. “What if we push the planes out at a 45-degree angle?" Turns out it was an easy change that had a big impact:

• First, it takes less time to push a plane straight back at a 45-degree angle than it does to back out straight, stop, turn, and then push it again.

• Second, the 45-degree angle means planes can start their engines earlier, instead of waiting until they're through the 90-degree turn.

• Third, when planes turn at 90 degrees, they block airplanes at the one or two gates behind them. Pushing back at 45 degrees means they don't block each other, so more tugs can push more planes at the same time.

None of the recommendations from the consulting firm came even close to the impact of this one. That’s mainly because they aren’t as close to the details of the process as the people who work with it every day.

The key lesson? Companies constantly under-estimate the genius of their teams and the value of small improvements that the people on the front line have to offer. Even greater impact comes from implementing processes for systematic continuous improvement that generate hundreds of ideas like Delta’s as a routine part of everyone’s day-to-day work.

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