Of all the places I have worked, the one that changed how I think about running things was not a technology company. It was an airline.
I spent part of my marketing career working with a national carrier. I was there for the commercial side, not the operational one, but you cannot sit inside an airline for long without absorbing how it actually functions. And what struck me had nothing to do with aircraft. It was the discipline underneath.
An airline is a company where being roughly right is not good enough, where thousands of independent things must happen in sequence every day, and where the cost of a small failure is visible to the public within minutes. Most businesses never face that pressure. Which is precisely why most businesses never develop the habits.
Four of those habits have followed me into every team I have run since, including the one building AssetEye at Dronetjek.
One. The checklist is not for beginners
The first thing that surprises outsiders is who uses checklists. Not the trainees. The most experienced people in the building, every single time, without exception, out loud.
In most industries a checklist is treated as scaffolding for the inexperienced. You use one while you are learning and you graduate from it. In aviation it is the opposite. Seniority does not exempt you. It obliges you.
The logic is simple once you hear it. Checklists are not there to compensate for lack of knowledge. They are there to compensate for lack of attention, and attention fails independently of expertise. In fact an expert doing a familiar task is the most likely person in the room to skip a step, because familiarity is exactly what stops you from noticing.
I have carried this into software. Our release process has a written sequence and the most senior person follows it in the same order as the newest one. Every time someone suggests that we are too experienced for it, I take that as evidence we need it more.
Two. Time is a shared resource, not a personal one
Airlines think about turnaround. The window between an aircraft arriving and departing again, during which cleaning, fuelling, catering, baggage, boarding, and checks all have to happen, largely in parallel, mostly by different teams.
What makes that work is not that everyone is fast. It is that everyone knows precisely when they are the constraint and when they are not. Being early is not virtuous if the person before you is late. Being fast in your own task while blocking someone else is not performance, it is noise.
Most companies have no shared sense of this at all. Every team optimises its own segment, reports its own speed, and nobody owns the gaps. The gaps are where all the time goes.
When I plan work now, I care far less about how long each task takes and far more about the handoffs between them. In practice almost every delayed project I have investigated was not slow work. It was fast work waiting.
Three. Report the near miss, not just the crash
This is the one I think is genuinely transferable to every industry on earth, and the one almost nobody copies.
Aviation built a culture where the things that almost went wrong are reported, systematically, by the people who almost caused them, without that report ending their career. The entire safety record of modern flying rests on this. You cannot learn from events that did not become disasters unless people tell you about them, and people only tell you if telling you is safe.
Now compare that to a normal company. What happens when someone nearly ships a serious mistake and catches it themselves at the last moment?
Nothing. They fix it quietly and say nothing, because there is no upside to raising your hand and no established way to do it. So the organisation learns nothing, and the same near miss keeps happening until one day somebody does not catch it.
I have tried to build the reporting habit into my teams, and I will be honest that it is the hardest of these four to establish. It requires you to visibly reward someone for telling you about a problem they created. The first time you do that badly, you never hear another one.
Four. Standardise the interface, not the person
Aircrews are frequently assembled from people who have not worked together before, and they function immediately. This is remarkable if you think about how most teams behave when you reshuffle them.
It works because what is standardised is the interface. The language, the sequence, the division of responsibility, the specific phrases used to hand over control. Individual style varies enormously. The protocol does not.
Most companies attempt the reverse. They try to standardise people through culture decks and shared values, while leaving the actual interfaces between roles completely improvised. Then they are surprised that every new joiner takes three months to become useful.
Standardise how work is handed over, how decisions are recorded, how a problem is escalated. Leave personality alone. You get consistency without turning people into copies of each other.
The part that does not transfer
I want to be careful here, because there is a version of this article that argues everyone should run their company like an airline. That would be wrong.
Aviation's discipline is proportionate to its consequences. The reason the process is heavy is that the failure mode is catastrophic and irreversible. Most of what most of us do is neither. If you apply aviation grade process to a marketing campaign you will produce a slow, joyless, expensive marketing campaign.
The judgement is knowing which parts of your work are actually irreversible. Almost every business has a small number of genuinely one way doors and a large number of things that feel serious but can be undone by Thursday. The mistake is treating them the same. Heavy process on reversible work is waste. Light process on irreversible work is how people get hurt.
The airline taught me to tell them apart, and to spend my discipline where it buys something.
Look at your own operation and find the handful of steps that cannot be undone. Put real process there. Everywhere else, get out of the way.
I am Issam Fathi, a technology strategist and the product manager of AssetEye by Dronetjek, based in Tetouan, Morocco. I help companies build, adapt, and grow through technology.
