Four thousand phones.
Twelve people answering.
One obvious fix.
Weather closes an airport. Everyone reaches for their phone at the same moment, and the contact centre is the only door. This demonstrates the alternative: three rebook options prepared inside the wait, before anyone dials.
“A delay notification tells you the thing you already know and none of the things you need.”
Southerly Air · an invented exampleThe delay that lands on everyone at once
The board changes. Four thousand people simultaneously want to know whether they get home tonight, what it costs them, and whether their connection is gone. Twelve agents pick up. Everyone else waits, refreshes, and waits again — and by the time they are answered they are already angry.
Disruption is the only moment where an airline’s entire customer relationship is decided, and it is the one moment when the airline is least able to answer the phone. The information needed already exists in the operation.
What happens now
A push notification, then a queue. The wait is spent producing frustration rather than answers.
What it costs
The most expensive hour in the airline’s year, spent making the relationship worse instead of better.
What the concept does
Prepares three genuine options against tonight’s actual availability, and stops. The passenger chooses.
And the question is the point. One optional question, asked inside the wait, is the only part of this that sends something back the other way. Decline it and the work still gets prepared — just with less of them in it.
One delay. Four passengers.
The same weather, four situations. Nothing is booked, rerouted or refunded by the concept — every option waits for the passenger, and the ones needing a person say so.
A template sends the same thing to everyone and changes the name. What matters here is the case that should get something different — or nothing at all.
The rules beside each draft are placeholders. A pilot replaces them with your actual policies. We have not seen those, and this concept does not guess at them.
The checks that run before an option reaches a passenger
Disruption is where automation is most tempting and most dangerous. The blocks are the point.
Drafts are held against the Civil Aviation Act 2023, the Fair Trading Act 1986, the Consumer Guarantees Act 1993, the Privacy Act 2020, and the Human Rights Act 1993.
Press run to see what it catches — and what it refuses to produce at all.
The disruption, before anything sends
Illustrative and fictional. No production access is requested by this concept.
| Passenger | Count | Prepared | Waiting on | Status |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| International connection at risk | — | Three options, connection flagged | Passenger to choose | Awaiting choice |
| Two adults, two under five | — | Three options, ranked for sleep | Passenger to choose | Awaiting choice |
| Simple same-day rebook | — | Three options prepared | Passenger to choose | Awaiting choice |
| Medical assistance noted | — | Nothing prepared | A named person, urgently | Held — no options |
| Unaccompanied minor | — | Nothing prepared | Guardian, via a person | Held — rerouted |
| Booking held by an agency | — | Options held | Agency of record | Parked |
Counts are blank because this is a demonstrator. There is no Southerly Air, and therefore no operation.
Every draft carries its own working.
Not a log somebody has to go and find. The provenance travels with the work — what it read, which rules it held, who must approve it, and what it refused to do.
This matters most on the day someone asks why it said what it said.
- Artefact
- Rebook options — international connection at risk
- Read
- Invented schedule and availability for an invented airline · booking fields: onward connection, party composition, assistance requirement, minor flag. No payment data.
- Rules held
- Civil Aviation Act 2023 · Fair Trading Act 1986 · Consumer Guarantees Act 1993 · Privacy Act 2020 · Human Rights Act 1993
- Refused
- Nothing was booked, moved or refunded. No compensation entitlement was asserted. No options were prepared for a booking carrying an assistance requirement or for an unaccompanied minor. No option was ranked by cost to the airline.
- Approver
- A named person. Unsent until then.
- Prepared
- —
- Reference
- —
What this will never do
It does not send. It prepares, and a named person sends. It does not publish to any channel, commit spend, move money, or make a decision that belongs to a person. It does not pretend to be a person — every draft says it was prepared by a machine and approved by a human.
No production access is requested by this concept.
Scope
In a real engagement: one disruption type, one route, one month. Not the operation, not pricing, not compensation, not the reservation system.
Access
Schedule and availability feeds, and the field names that mark connections, party composition, assistance requirements and minor bookings. No payment data.
Scorecard
Passengers who chose an option instead of calling. Held cases a person agreed should have been held. Contact-centre calls avoided during the peak hour. And whether a duty manager would send the option list under their own name.
Fail any line of the scorecard and we change the design or stop.
Pick a verb.
Not “book a demo”. Any of these is a real next step, and the third is a perfectly good answer.
What is the one constraint we have got wrong?
Every concept is built from the outside. There is always something about how Southerly actually runs that we could not see. One line is enough.
Opens your mail app to assembl@assembl.co.nz. Nothing is collected by this page.