What Southwest’s Seating Change Tells Leaders About Trust

A system can keep working while asking more and more of the customer. Southwest's open seating is a good example. It rewarded vigilance, so customers who checked in early and learned the system got better outcomes. The process looked efficient and even empowering on paper. In practice, the customer was doing work just to feel settled. The same issue shows up well beyond airlines. Part of creative leadership is noticing when a system delivers results by asking people to work harder than they should have to.

Open seating functioned in the visible sense. The planes filled and boarding kept moving. But customers had to think about their check-in timing, position in line, and seat availability before they could relax. A system does not always look broken when people have learned to compensate for it. Over time, those workarounds become part of the experience. Fatigue can be an earlier warning sign than any formal complaint. Assigned seating replaces that uncertainty with a clear answer. Customers were asking for something simpler than luxury.

They just wanted to know where they'd be sitting without having to manage the whole process themselves.

You see the same pattern in approval processes that need five signatures just to be safe, in onboarding that assumes customers will read everything, and in internal systems that leave people constantly double-checking themselves. When customers or employees or partners need workarounds just to move forward with confidence, the system may be functioning exactly as designed while it slowly wears down trust. If people need tricks to succeed, the design deserves another look. Creative judgment asks more than whether a strategy works on paper. It asks what behavior the strategy actually rewards once real people are living with it.

When people describe a working system as tiring, the operational issue has already reached trust. Leaders need to look for the places where their own design asks people to compensate for it.