Can a Flight Cancelation Be a Gift?

I start this blogpost the morning after arriving here in Sweden where I’m expected to give a workshop and a keynote soon. The question “how is this a gift to me?” came from the person who invited me here to speak, something her mentor or colleague used to say, and she said it to me as we were texting our way through my flight cancelation and rerouting, which was slightly more complex than normal… and I wanted to both share the story itself of my experience, in case it helps someone in the future, and also reflect on how this experience has given me ideas on how to facilitate my workshop on uncertainty. As I analyze the experience and break it down, if you know of literature that already says what I’m saying, please share it in the comments? Thanks!

My workshop already integrates work of adrienne maree brown’s Emergent Strategy, the Cynefin Framework (I learned about it from Dave Cormier and also read a chapter on Uncertainty in his book) and I’m getting some inspiration from ancient Egyptian monuments and I’m planning to do the Liberating structure Ecocycle planning towards the end.

Quick story: we were traveling to Sweden through Germany via Lufthansa and during our layover in Germany, our outgoing flight to Sweden kept getting delayed until it got completely canceled. AFTER we had boarded the plane. Now, for some reason, the supposedly well-organized Germans managed to cancel 8 different planes, but not arrange enough buses to take passengers off the planes back to the airport terminal. So we had like an hour on the plane to stew. Worse, they gave no info orally on what would happen but said we would receive emails or texts from Lufthansa on what would happen next in terms of rerouting and hotel stay (it was near midnight already). Thank God I had roaming, because otherwise, it would have been a disaster of an hour. First, the thing I was most worried about is that my child was traveling with me but her ticket was booked from Egypt and mine was booked from Sweden by the people inviting me. I needed to call the taxi company to cancel and the hotel to let them know I wasn’t coming. I was lucky that the person who invited me was awake thar late at night and she managed to contact their Uni’s travel agency to connect my flight to my daughter’s so they wouldn’t reroute us separately. Because the Messages I was receiving from Lufthansa gave me a chatbot that couldn’t handle the complexity of my problem and said it would reroute me speak to a human. The human I connected with was called Winston (ok, I’m suspicious about that name, but…) then I got disconnected from the human and couldn’t go much further. In any case, once I knew my ticket was now connected to my child’s ticket, I felt calmer. After we deboarded the plane, they asked us to go to a Lufthansa service desk to get our hotel and taxi vouchers (hotel was not in the airport). Eventually, our flights were re-routed for the next day. A 2-hour flight from Frankfurt to Stockholm became a 7-hour journey through Munich (where my husband and I spent a couple of days during our honeymoon, so I was happy for my kid to pass through). It was all fine in the end and thankfully we had all our medications, but we did not get out luggage overnight, and that was… Unpleasant. I had had a flight canceled before, but I remember having my luggage overnight. 

[Quick tangent on the medication. It needs to be in a cooler bag so I travel with it and in Cairo airport I need to take it out for inspection. The inspection took a while and I was standing waiting but another woman was talking to the security guy, and suddenly our meds disappeared. I panicked and started looking inside trashcans and everyone around me started to help. This elderly guy said I am sick too, but I didn’t take your medicine. It was a really odd response from him, but he must have sensed something, because it turns out the other woman standing by the security guard was his wife, and she thought our meds were her husband’s and she took them. Whew!].

Anyway… from this whole experience, I think I came up with a range of attitudes one can have towards uncertainty, and I think I actually went through all of them that day!!! Mitigate, embrace, panic and ignore.

1. Mitigate (prepare ahead, usually coz the thing is high stakes like medical stuff or coz have past experiences they learned from). This person is risk averse and active in pre-planning. What I learned from this recent experience is that I mitigated against loss of my checked in luggage by having medication on us, but did not mitigate against a flight delay/cancelation by having a change of clothes, deodorant, etc., in our hand luggage (now I know!).  I also mitigated by arriving several days before my event. I have the privilege of being able to afford a few extra days on my own dime. In other situations, I go just for my event and leave with no buffer, due to other commitments at home like teaching or childcare or such.
2. Embrace (don’t prepare per se but have a good attitude and pivot easily and quickly – usually comes from privilege + imagination + not for high risk things like medical conditions). In my case, I had the privilege of having roaming internet on my phone so could call my taxi, email my hotel, text the person who invited me. I looked on the bright side of passing through Munich and telling my daughter about our honeymoon. I felt OK. The embrace attitude is someone who is to some extent a risk-taker, and active (as in, acts positively when the unexpected happens). This all comes from privilege of experience or financial, medical, social privilege. If I spoke German I would embraced this even more, for example, in this context. Most importantly, this person usually has sufficient imagination and resources to figure out viable alternatives and not panic… btw, I also had gifts for participants in my luggage that I needed to use on the workshop and was worried my luggage could get lost (coz,delays, cancelations and rerouting, from experience, can cause luggage to be lost) but I was ok to rethink my approach to the workshop in case the gifts didn’t come through.
3. Panic/freeze, usually coz not expecting and also have some important risk e.g. financial challenges or urgent commitment. In this situation, one is risk averse, and passive or paralyzed. This was me when the meds went missing. I felt helpless and I could not imagine any alternatives. I had health insurance but I didn’t have doctors in Europe to re-prescribe the medicine if we didn’t find it. The meds are expensive and difficult to find, and we could not possibly go through an entire trip without them. The consequences were huge and the complexity of managing the situation was enormous. I now have ideas for mitigating this but it’s still normal, I feel, to have panicked in that moment. I also think about people who have anxiety or OCD or such, though I guess a person with OCD maybe would have preplanned?
4. Ignore. Do nothing, feel nothing. Risk taking but passive. This could come from ignorance of what is possible or deciding not to engage with possibilities for uncertainty outside the planned path.

I think having more experience with uncertainty can help a person better pre-plan (and I am glad my child experienced this for the first time in the safety of my presence, so hopefully in future she’s ready for it), or at least embrace because it happened before and everything went OK.

In any case, the parallel with education is that I can totally see how people reacted to COVID like that (some embraced, some had already had experience online and blended learning so mitigated, and others just panicked or pretended it wasn’t a big thing they needed to change). And also reactions to AI: the ignore is like people who took a head-in-the-sand approach. I don’t know that people are gonna react the same to all challenges.

There is a lot of context and power here. Do you have resources, connections, how high are the stakes, is the uncertainty real or just the facts hidden from you? I also think we need to think of our own teaching and how much our students can work with uncertainty. Can we mentor them through uncertainty or should we be trying to reduce their uncertainty so as not to disadvantage some groups? Whenever people talk about institutional AI guidelines and how each prof has a different approach and this confuses students… I feel like, this is real life and students need to navigate how different workplaces may have different attitudes toward AI. We should not try to enforce uniformity in ways that don’t help them prepare for ambiguity and complexity in real life… as long as they’re old enough to be mature in handling it. I’m not suggesting this for 4 year-olds!

I got feedback from a friend that this flight cancelation example is privileged in itself. What if my audience include people who have never traveled. In a classroom context, I will include a parallel example of my child’s exams last year getting postponed indefinitely in the middle of the exam period (it was bizarre!!).Let me know if you think I missed something that isn’t here in terms of reactions to uncertainty. 

Image by Elisabeth Zink from Pixabay – loved this editor’s pick from pixabay of a hand of a woman holding golden stars… representing possible gift giving.