Closing doors on time

How to cite this work

Bentivegna, Leonel S. “Cerrar puertas a tiempo: procedimientos y estándares en la gestión del cambio” [Closing doors on time: procedures and standards in change management], September 2026. https://www.leobentivegna.com/en/articles/cerrar-puertas-a-tiempo

Anyone who has worked at an airport knows the scene: the aircraft is ready, the load documentation has already been issued, the crew is waiting for clearance and, at that very moment, a passenger comes running down the jet bridge, a bag reaches the hold late, or there is a last-minute fuel adjustment. To absorb these situations without delaying the flight, the industry relies on so-called Last Minute Changes (LMC), a mechanism that, according to the UK aviation authority (UK CAA, 2014), allows late modifications to be added to an already finalised loadsheet without redoing the whole document. Although it is a tool designed to give the operation flexibility, it could also be seen as a point of risk, since every change is processed under pressure, with information passing between several people and, often, through channels as informal as a radio or a phone call.

In this sense, the case of a commercial airline that decided to restrict the use of LMCs is of interest to this paper not so much for its technical content as for what it reveals about a problem that goes beyond aviation: how to get an entire organisation to change an entrenched practice. Broadly speaking, the restriction narrowed the situations in which a last-minute change is accepted and established that, beyond a certain threshold, the documentation must be issued again. Seen in the abstract, the rule seems simple. Its implementation, however, made it clear that writing a procedure is only part of the work, and probably not the hardest part.

One change, many interests

On the other hand, what the safety department sees as an obvious improvement can be read very differently from other parts of the company. R. Edward Freeman (1984), one of the leading figures in strategic management, proposed understanding organisations as a network of stakeholders, that is, of groups with legitimate interests that often come into tension with one another. From this perspective, the LMC restriction did not affect a single actor but several at once: for boarding staff it could mean closing a flight with a passenger left behind; for the ramp, the risk of delays over a late bag; for dispatch, more documentation to reissue; and for the commercial area it could translate into lost revenue, among other issues. It could be argued that none of these actors was wrong by their own logic, and that is precisely where the complexity of any organisational change lies.

Unfreeze before you change

As for how to approach this challenge, one of the oldest models in business administration, and one that still holds, is that of Kurt Lewin (1947), who described change as a three-stage process: unfreezing existing practices, introducing the modification, and stabilising it again as the new norm. According to the author, no organisation adopts a new practice unless the old one is first called into question. Applied to this case, it means that announcing the new rule without explaining why the old one was no longer enough amounts to skipping the first stage, and the result is usually a formal compliance that does not hold over time.

Likewise, John Kotter (1995), in an article that became essential reading on the subject, analysed why most corporate transformation efforts fail. Among the most frequent mistakes, the author highlights the lack of a shared sense of urgency and, above all, leaders’ tendency to underestimate how much they need to communicate a change, to the point of stating that they usually fall short by a factor of ten. It is worth noting that, in the LMC case, the notice to the different areas was not framed as a single announcement but as a message tailored to each department, explaining both the safety rationale and the concrete impact on their daily work.

Informing is not the same as convincing

For his part, Jeffrey Hiatt (2006) developed the ADKAR model, which breaks individual change down into five moments: becoming aware of the need, wanting to take part, knowing how to do it, having the ability to do it, and having reinforcement that sustains it. Although the model was designed for corporate settings in general, it is particularly useful for reading aviation, since it shows that a procedure published in a manual covers, at best, awareness and knowledge, but does not guarantee the desire or the ability to apply it at five in the morning with a delayed flight.

In fact, one of the most cited studies on resistance to change comes not from an airline but from a textile factory. Lester Coch and John French (1948) observed that groups of workers who took part in designing a change to their working methods adapted faster and showed less resistance than those who were simply told about the new approach. Seventy-five years later, the lesson seems to hold: a procedure written solely from an office, without listening to those who will carry it out on the apron, is highly likely to be reinterpreted in practice.

Between what is written and what actually happens

From this perspective, safety management speaks of the gap between work as imagined and work as done, an idea developed by Erik Hollnagel (2017) and to which Eurocontrol devoted an entire issue of its HindSight magazine. One might expect that, faced with a restriction like the one on LMCs and under the pressure of a departure time, informal adaptations would emerge that the rule does not account for. It cannot be claimed that this happens in every case, but the mere possibility justifies making post-implementation follow-up as important as drafting the procedure. Along the same lines, Monika Mejstrikova, from IATA (2026), warned that many ground handling processes still rely on disconnected systems, manual loading and late information, which opens the door to errors such as incorrectly loaded aircraft.

Finally, it is important to note that in aviation these ideas from business administration are not optional; they are formalised. Annex 19 of the International Civil Aviation Organization (ICAO, 2013) made so-called management of change mandatory, requiring the risks of any modification to be assessed before it is implemented. While the standard provides the framework, the LMC experience suggests that its success depends largely on factors no regulation can guarantee on its own: participation, communication, and a shared understanding of the why. The next section looks at how ANAC and EASA regulate this kind of modification, and to what extent their approaches leave more or less room for these human and organisational aspects.

References

Documents

• IATA, “Stronger Standard Implementation, Modern GSE, and Digitalization Are Key to More Resilient Ground Handling”, press release, 19 May 2026.
• ICAO, Annex 19 to the Convention on International Civil Aviation. Safety Management, 2013.
• UK Civil Aviation Authority, CAP 1008. Ground Handling – Last Minute Changes (LMC) Guidance Document, 2014.

Bibliography

• Coch, Lester and French, John R. P. “Overcoming resistance to change”, Human Relations, 1, 4, 1948, pp. 512-532.
• Freeman, R. Edward (1984). Strategic Management: A Stakeholder Approach. Pitman.
• Hiatt, Jeffrey M. (2006). ADKAR: A Model for Change in Business, Government and Our Community. Prosci Learning Center Publications.
• Hollnagel, Erik. “Can we ever imagine how work is done?”, HindSight, 25, Eurocontrol, 2017.
• Kotter, John P. “Leading change: Why transformation efforts fail”, Harvard Business Review, 73, 2, 1995, pp. 59-67.
• Lewin, Kurt. “Frontiers in group dynamics: Concept, method and reality in social science; social equilibria and social change”, Human Relations, 1, 1, 1947, pp. 5-41.