The other week I flew Southwest for the first time in a while. (I was headed from my home in Philly to Pittsburgh for a customer meeting.) Along the way, I got an interesting and unexpected lesson in the value of self-organization.
Usually, I fly on United (San Francisco is a hub) or USAir (Philly is a hub). Both of those airlines are as traditional as you get, and seating is always a problem. Because I travel on business, I usually book my tickets later than vacation travelers. That means that seat availability is poor, and invariably I get stuck in the back of the plane. I hate sitting in the back of the plane. It’s not the back of the plane per se that I hate, but the hassle of getting in and out. I’m a big guy, I usually carry my baggage on the plane, and I’m often rushing to make a business meeting. So I don’t like the discomfort of moving down the aisle, and I resent the time that I lose waiting for all those people to get off the plane ahead of me.
Southwest seating works differently. There are no pre-set seat assignments. You can sit wherever is available. You do, however, get a boarding priority assignment based (I assume) on when you bought your ticket and how much you paid for it.
When I got to the airport this morning, I discovered that my boarding priority assignment was a high number. I would be one of the last to board the plane. So I assumed that I would, once again, sit in the back of the plane. Probably in the middle seat.
So imagine my surprise when there were aisle seats available in Row 3 on the outbound flight. On the return, I got an aisle seat in the first row bulkhead. And it’s not as though the flight was empty. Roughly 60-70% of the seats were occupied. It just turns out that the seats I like–the ones right up near the front of the plane–aren’t nearly as popular as I had always assumed. My co-passengers walked right by them in order to sit in the middle of the plane and towards the back.
Why did the other passengers choose to sit where they sat? Bathroom proximity? More leisurely deplaning? I have no idea. You’d have to ask them. But clearly their preferences are different from mine. Like Jack Sprat and his wife, we complemented each other’s preferences nicely. More importantly, by self-organizing we seem to have done a better job optimizing for everyone’s happiness than we do it the old-fashioned way: by having some self-appointed ticketing agent decide where we ought to sit.
Why don’t the other airlines do it this way?
More to the point, what can Southwest teach us about the organization of ideas? So often,w e try to do to ideas what United and USAir do to passengers: organize them according to some central notion of where they ought to sit. But what happens when we let the ideas organize themselves? It may sound like anarchy, but then again Southwest’s open seating sounds pretty chaotic until you see it in action.
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