Jason Harp on Using Chaos for Good
Jason Harp knows a little about planning – and what happens when situations go sideways. He joined Permanent Equity-owned aerospace businesses Pacific Air Industries (Pac-Air) and Air-Cert as CEO in November of 2019. For anyone keeping track, that’s a mere four months before Covid walloped the airline industry.
Rigorously trained on Gantt charts in a previous life, Jason still uses a lot of the same framework – even if the sort now happens more frequently in his head than in a spreadsheet. Ask him about proactive change and he’ll call it a luxury available in rare periods of “stability and complacency.”
For Jason, planning is less about the plan and more about harnessing energy:
“When you get punched in the face, instead of stumbling backwards, stumble forwards. Instead of forcing things to change, adapt to the fact that things are changing and make them change in your favor. Use the chaos for good rather than planning for good times or forcing the next thing to occur.”
Below are excerpts from a conversation we had with Jason about executing a long-term strategic plan amid incredible near-term uncertainty.
In February of 2020 – just barely pre-Covid, at least in the United States – Pac-Air decided they wanted to grow into new markets.
“The basic premise was to do more of what works and figure out what to do with all of the inventory we had.” For Jason, the answer to what works was, “We know how to buy inventory at really great prices, move it, and make a return on it. I wanted to go invest in inventory and figure out how to buy more of it at a greater scale.”
The problem?
“We already had a ton of inventory that wasn’t moving – so the plan would have created operational nightmares if we didn’t figure out how to move what we had.”
And that’s before Covid threw additional challenges at the business.
Planning in a long-term context – rather than being forced to make plans to survive the short term – lets you think differently about what decisions and investments are going to provide real value and what you want to prioritize. Instead of planning for short-term safety, Jason and Pac-Air took a longer view.
The approach to planning (i.e., falling forward post-punch toward a loosely held vision) at Pac-Air/Air-Cert looked something like this:
Structure & Analyze: Figure out the key levers to pull in your organization (good or bad).
Generate Options: Create a long list of things you might want to do in the context of how you might act on them.
Prioritize: Use some framework – like [(Expected benefit - Expected cost)*Probability of Success] – to rank order the options generated into what to work on next.
Act: Do what you said you would do.
In practice, here’s how it shook out for both hiring and expansion:
Structure & Analyze
“Step one was to look at the data and figure out what’s going on. That allowed us to be able to say that we do buy inventory really well. That was a belief that was confirmed with some analysis. We then also did a deep dive around the inventory that was on our shelves to figure out which customers were off, which customers were not off, and why.”
This type of data was critical to understanding what types of actions – and what types of plans – were going to make the biggest differences at Pac-Air (see the Pareto Principle). But even gathering this data to analyze meant prioritizing some plans over others, and it was only worth it in the right context.
“We spent a lot of money on data in what was maybe our worst month, April or May of 2020. But we did that because we had to figure out what was going on. This is the kind of thing that you’re only allowed to do because you have a very long-term context.”
Generate Options
Once they had the data, they started generating options based on what they should be doing and what they wanted to be doing – what was going to drive differentiation and value.
“So we understood that some things were broken. But we can walk and chew gum at the same time, so we can also ask, ‘What would we want to do better?’ Our competitors were selling into Asia like crazy, and we weren’t at all. When I looked at other markets that we could sell into, the two big options were Latin America and Asia. We had pretty strong growth in Latin America. Our differentiating advantage was Asia.”
Jason called these ideas and options “notions,” rather than “plans,” which allowed him to stay flexible in thinking about possible pathways through the crisis and beyond. And those notions mapped to several broader goals: expand into Asia, bring in new people, develop the team. But to do any of that, they needed someone to lead the region.
Prioritize & Act
They hired for the position – this was the priority, and what they said they’d do. They also, though, ended up with another candidate who didn’t fit the role, but had something:
“In the back of my mind, I had this idea that I needed help all around this business. There were a lot of things that needed to be done and a lot of things that needed to be figured out, and some of those things to be figured out were what needed to be done.”
This candidate had a generalist background with strong communications and organization capabilities – and experience relevant to some projects Pac-Air had on the back burner. So, Pac-Air hired this person, too. Admittedly, “this is not the kind of thing you do in the middle of a pandemic unless you have a very long-term horizon.”
Here, the key was to be able not only to identify the talent and identify the priority but also, to some extent, to be willing to reshuffle the priorities based on the conviction that the change would drive value:
“There were very specific projects that I knew would drive dollars, and then there were very fuzzy projects that I thought would be helpful and maybe wouldn’t drive value…as long as we filtered in a few of those projects with quick and specific payback with some broader, more long-term stuff, then I was excited about that too. There can be a nonlinear payout.”
Planning for optionality also meant planning for serendipity, or at least allowing it into the planning process:
“I have a vision, and I’ve stopped worrying about how I’m going to get to that vision. In other words, I generally know where I want to get to…Strict plans, five year plans, aren’t being written out, but it’s not like it’s not being done, either.”
And, there’s real upside to be found in embracing chaos and macro factors:
“Instead of stumbling backwards, stumble forwards. Instead of forcing things to change, adapt to the fact that things are changing and make them change in your favor.”
That’s directionality – a posture rather than a plan.
Amidst chaos in the market, Pac-Air was able to shift focus to hiring and expansion, to fall forward after a Covid punch, because of a long time horizon, flexibility, and a commitment to updating priorities based on changing information and circumstances. Harnessing energy, rather than following a rigid plan, opened new pathways from weathering the storm to what comes next.