The Person Who Created a Scene May Have Actually Solved the Problem
Last month, I landed at Indira Gandhi International Airport in Delhi.
Immigration took less than 30 seconds. I had enrolled earlier in India’s Fast Track Immigration – Trusted Traveller Programme (FTI-TTP), which allows registered Indian nationals and OCI cardholders to use biometric e-gates for immigration clearance. (FTITTP)
So, immigration was wonderfully efficient.
Baggage, however, a completely different story.
I waited nearly an hour for my bag.
The carousel was long, and passengers were distributed along it, waiting for their luggage to appear. After a while, some passengers walked around to the other end and discovered something strange.
Airport staff had been removing bags from the carousel and lining them up on the floor in the space between two carousels.
That created a mess of its own.
People standing at one end continued waiting for bags that may already have been off loaded at the other end. Meanwhile, passengers who had moved to the other side found themselves navigating around rows of luggage sitting on the floor.
It was frustrating. Confusing. And, from a passenger’s perspective, not particularly well designed.
But there was a logic to what the staff were doing.
When the carousel gets too full, sensors can slow down the feeding belts. By removing bags from the carousel, the staff were creating space and allowing the system to continue moving. They were also helping passengers by getting bags off the belt.
So the staff weren’t necessarily doing something wrong.
They were solving one problem while inadvertently creating another.
Then came the interesting part.
One passenger became furious and started blasting the airport staff.
I remember thinking: What’s the point?
These weren’t the people designing the baggage-handling system. They were employees following the instructions they had been given. Yelling at them wasn’t going to redesign the carousel.
Or so I thought.
About two weeks later, I landed at the same airport again.
This time, something was different.
Instead of lifting bags off the carousel and putting them on the floor, the staff were consolidating the bags on the carousel itself, standing them together and creating additional space for incoming luggage.
Same carousel.
Same basic problem.
Very different solution.
And it worked much better.
That left me wondering: Did the angry passenger have something to do with the change?
I have no idea.
It could have been a planned operational improvement. Someone may have reviewed the process independently. A supervisor may have noticed the problem. Or perhaps that passenger’s outburst triggered someone to rethink what was happening.
There is simply no way for me to know.
But the coincidence made me think about something much bigger.
Does the approach matter more than the result?
We tend to place enormous emphasis on how something is done.
We say:
“That wasn’t the right way to raise the issue.”
“She was too aggressive.”
“He shouldn’t have spoken to his manager like that.”
“He was completely out of line.”
And sometimes that’s absolutely true.
But there is another question worth asking:
What happened because the person raised the issue?
This is where things get uncomfortable.
An unpleasant approach can sometimes produce a valuable result.
And a perfectly polite, professional, well-intentioned approach can sometimes produce absolutely nothing.
That doesn’t make bad behavior good.
It does, however, make the relationship between approach and outcome more complicated than we often admit.
The four-quadrant problem
Think about any situation where someone is trying to create change.
There are two dimensions:
Approach: Good or bad
Result: Good or bad
That gives us four possibilities.
The first quadrant is obviously where we want to live.
A thoughtful approach that produces a good result.
But real life isn’t always that neat.
1. Good approach + good result
This is the gold standard.
You identify the problem, understand the underlying cause, engage the right people, propose a solution and achieve the desired outcome.
No drama required.
This should always be the preferred approach.
2. Good approach + bad result
This is not necessarily failure.
You can communicate respectfully, analyze the problem correctly and still discover that the proposed solution doesn’t work.
That’s where learning matters.
You adjust, try again and improve.
In an organization, this quadrant should be perfectly acceptable.
Good processes sometimes produce bad outcomes. What matters is whether we learn from them.
3. Bad approach + good result
This is the uncomfortable one.
The angry passenger may or may not have belonged here.
Suppose her behavior was inappropriate, but suppose it also caused someone to examine the baggage-handling process and eventually improve it.
Was her behavior good?
No.
Was the result good?
Possibly.
Should we therefore encourage people to behave that way?
Absolutely not.
That’s an important distinction.
A good result doesn’t retroactively make a bad approach good.
But neither should we be so focused on condemning the approach that we fail to recognize a useful outcome.
In leadership, this is where things get particularly interesting.
Sometimes the person who is difficult to deal with is pointing at a real problem.
The right response isn’t necessarily to copy their behavior.
It may be to separate the signal from the noise.
Ignore the unnecessary aggression.
Listen to the underlying complaint.
4. Bad approach + bad result
This is where everyone loses.
Someone creates conflict, people become defensive, relationships deteriorate, and nothing improves.
There is little to admire here.
Yet organizations can spend enormous amounts of energy dealing with this quadrant because the behavior itself becomes the story.
The original problem gets forgotten.
So which matters more: approach or result?
My answer is: both, but not equally in every situation.
When the stakes are low and there is time to iterate, the approach matters enormously.
You want collaboration, respect, evidence and thoughtful problem-solving.
When the stakes are high or time is limited, however, results become disproportionately important.
Imagine a production system going down.
You don’t want someone spending three hours having the perfect conversation about the outage.
You want the system restored.
Then you can have the conversation about what went wrong.
On the other hand, if you are building a long-term team, repeatedly getting results through intimidation or disrespect can be extremely expensive.
You may achieve today’s target while destroying tomorrow’s organization.
So perhaps the better question isn’t:
“Was the approach good or bad?”
It is:
“What did the approach achieve, what did it cost, and what did we learn?”
That’s a much more useful leadership question.
And there is one more lesson from that baggage carousel.
Don’t confuse the messenger with the message
This may be the biggest takeaway for me.
We often evaluate an idea based on the person delivering it.
If someone we like raises an issue politely, we listen.
If someone we dislike raises the same issue angrily, we dismiss them.
That’s dangerous.
The delivery may be wrong.
The person may be wrong.
The motivation may even be wrong.
But the underlying problem can still be real.
Good leaders learn to separate the quality of the message from the quality of its delivery.
And sometimes the person making the most noise is the one who has exposed something everyone else had stopped noticing.
I still don’t know whether that passenger’s outburst had anything to do with the improved baggage handling I saw two weeks later.
Probably, I never will.
But I do know this: The next time someone creates an uncomfortable scene about a problem, I’ll try not to stop at judging how they raised it.
I’ll also ask: “Is there actually a problem here, and if there is, what can we do about it?”
Because ultimately, organizations don’t improve merely because people behave nicely.
They improve when someone notices something isn’t working, and someone else is willing to fix it.
[Experience, observation, thoughts, quadrant, and raw article (not shown here): mine | Words, takeaways, and quadrant image: ChatGPT]