Post by Peter Lewis on Jun 21, 2020 21:15:49 GMT 12
General Aviation Advocacy network:
June 2020 Bulletin
Fellow aviators
It’s official: The CAA is toxic – but will it get a detox?
Cast your mind back to 2018 and you may recall the saga of the CAA Client Satisfaction Survey and how the
Authority’s leading lights rubbished the results when the GAA ran a customer survey after the CAA refused to do the job.
The Director and CEO, Graeme Harris, rejected what GAA supporters said about his Authority after our survey of
opinion in 2018 and 2019. His compatriot, Board Chairman Nigel Gould - having spurned our suggestion that the
CAA conduct a customer satisfaction survey - casually dismissed the results of ours, which had overwhelmingly condemned the CAA’s performance.
It was obvious that the CAA, from the board level down, was refusing to acknowledge facts because it preferred delusions. Strange how some people are selective about the truth when it doesn’t fit with what they want to see or hear...
However, the truth doesn’t change simply because the CAA can’t stomach it. The GAA has often pointed out deficiencies in the governance of the CAA to various ministers of transport. The standard response has been that they have “full confidence in the CAA”.
Now the worm has dramatically turned. We have seen the previous chairman and his deputy leave the Authority under the darkest of clouds, while that ministerial confidence silently evaporated. Then, when the Director suddenly departed in March 2020, he left the office with more questions than answers.
Did he retire (as officially described) or did he resign (as certain sections of the media said) or was he forced out by politicians who knew what was coming to Graeme Harris and them?
Why did he quit at the moment New Zealand aviation was struck down by the Covid-19 crisis? Did his departure have anything to do with an impending report on a review of CAA culture sparked by CAA whistleblowers? Did it occur to him that his vision of an expanding CAA had been destroyed (along with most of his customer base) almost overnight?
In time, these and other important questions may be answered.
The doors of the Asteron Centre have also closed permanently on the Deputy Director General Aviation, Steve Moore, who is “taking time out” and the Chief Legal Counsel, John Sneyd, who is now General Manager Building System Performance with the Ministry of Business, Innovation and Employment. Good career move, some might say.
When staff whistleblowers finally emerged to tell the public what the general aviation industry had been saying for years about the CAA, it caused a stir which was probably discarded by most of the public along with the fish and chip wrappers. But the GAA’s supporters had been saying much the same thing for a decade or more: the CAA was dysfunctional, too bureaucratic, too expensive, punitive and oppressive.
The common keyword from staff and customers of the CAA was: “Toxic”.
The review of CAA culture didn’t mince words. It agreed with the whistleblowers and the definition of toxic.
The CAA is now said to be undergoing a period of “organisational transformation”. Those of a cynical nature may suspect this to resemble the reorganisation of deckchairs on the Titanic, as the mighty liner sinks.
With much of the old guard having been swept away, let’s briefly look at the new brooms.
On paper, the recently appointed CAA Acting Director and Chief Executive, Shelley Turner, seems well qualified to effect a long-overdue change of culture. She has come from the New Zealand Intelligence community where she was Deputy Director General and led a programme of “transformation across the organisation.” Just how successful that was, we may never be told. Prior to that, she was with the State Services Commission as Manager People and Development.
The CAA also has a new Deputy Chief Executive Officer, Mahanga Maru, who grandly claims: “I keep the skies of Aotearoa safe and secure. I lead the development and implementation of the CAA’s stakeholder engagement strategy and plan. I oversee and co-ordinate the CAA’s relationship with key stakeholders.” Prior to joining the CAA, he spent some time as Chief Maori Advisor with New Zealand Petroleum and Minerals, where he was “responsible for advising his colleagues and stakeholders how to effectively engage with whanau, hapu and iwi to achieve mutually agreeable outcomes”.
We note some cringe-worthy corporate-speak, but there is – encouragingly – also some flying experience, since he qualified as a flying instructor in 1990, and has played a leading role in the resurrection of the Ruatoria Aero Club and airfield. GA stakeholders are looking forward to hearing from Mr Maru.
Janine Hearn, the Deputy Chief Executive Aviation Safety, also comes from a Human Resources background after spending time as GM, People and Culture with the Mid-Central District Health Board and before that, GM, Human Resources at Worksafe.
One might be forgiven for believing that the Authority is now being driven almost exclusively by an HR-orientated executive structure. (And what an odious term is Human Resources; humans are sentient beings, not commodities.) There is scant evidence of in-depth aviation experience among the recent senior appointees.
Can we nevertheless hope for a leaner, lighter, better-balanced aviation administration that manages its affairs more efficiently and takes much better care of its core customers? Dare we hope for a less authoritarian, made-to-measure, radically reformed and perhaps renamed Civil Aviation Administration of New Zealand? Less dictatorial, more all-encompassing, less bureaucratic, more friendly?
Only time will tell whether any meaningful changes occur with the relationship the CAA has with its GA clients.
But there is room for a smidgeon of optimism...
Dear Ms Fredric, we’re clients and we’re not satisfied
CAA Acting Director Shelley Turner greeted the damning report on her Authority’s “culture” with much aspirational talk, which amounted to a promise of internal change and eventually closer relationships with the “stakeholders”.
So we thought it might be a good time to resurrect the ancient idea (abandoned decades ago by the CAA and resisted by it ever since) of the Client Satisfaction Survey.
Bright-eyed and ever the optimist, GAA co-principal Des Lines wrote to Board Chairperson Janice Fredric about this back in early March, providing her with the detailed background to this issue. He told her:
“The GAA has always believed that client satisfaction survey findings should become an important part of the CAA’s business planning, highlighting areas where it is doing well, as well as those that need to be focused on and improved. A client feedback system also provides valuable information to not only the CAA Board, but also senior managers can use it to gauge the performance and effectiveness of the departments they administer.
As a result of what appeared to be widespread dissatisfaction among General Aviation (GA) pilots and operators with the Civil Aviation Authority (CAA), in 2016, we began making enquiries.
A CAA client satisfaction survey in 2003 had shown areas where clients were critical of the Authority’s performance. The 2010 Martin Jenkins Value for Money Report on the CAA also identified persistent failings.
In May 2016, we wrote to the CAA Director, noting that the Authority carried out a client satisfaction survey in 1998 and another in 2003. Colmar Brunton Research ran both these surveys and, prior to the main survey, it first conducted a series of in-depth, exploratory, qualitative interviews with slightly more than 300 CAA customers.
We also noted that there appeared to have been no further CAA client satisfaction survey conducted since 2003, on what had seemed to be an established five-yearly cycle.
The Director chose not to reply, and instead sent the letter to the CAA’s Official Information and Privacy Officer.
In June 2016, the officer advised us that:
The Client Satisfaction Surveys conducted in 1998 and 2003 were seemingly brought about as a performance measure under agreement with the Minister of Transport. When this agreement ended, new performance measures would likely have been established with different methods of determining performance.
The CAA has continued to conduct various public opinion surveys, with Colmar Brunton’s assistance, but for different reasons. For example, the Feel Safe Survey was conducted in 2011, 2013 and 2014 in order to determine how safe people feel whilst flying and to gage (sic) their impressions of CAA and AvSec’s effectiveness.
The 2013 survey was a Feel Safe survey and not a client satisfaction survey.
Lacking a substantive response from the Director, we wrote to the CEO of the Ministry of Transport.
In a letter of 22 December 2016, Peter Mersi, CEO of the Ministry of Transport at the time, replied:
I note your comments about the merits of conducting client satisfaction surveys and your suggestion that the Ministry should instruct the CAA Board to undertake them (among other things). Whilst I understand the reasons you have suggested this, this would not be consistent with the legal framework for Crown entities. You may be aware that this covered by the Crown Entities Act 2004, and responsibility for the operation of a Crown entity rests with the Board of the entity. Accordingly, it is up to the Board of the CAA, which makes delegations to its Chief Executive, to determine the type of surveys it undertakes.
We followed the advice of the Ministry and took the issue up with the board. In a letter of January 2017 to CAA Board Chairman Nigel Gould, we asked similar questions to those we had asked the Director and pointed out the lack of substantive detail in the OIA reply around the words ‘seemingly’ and ‘would likely have been’.
Gould replied, saying:
‘Your interest in surveys is topical, as the CAA will shortly be repeating its flagship ‘Feel Safe’ survey conducted by Colmar Brunton. Management are currently planning on supplementing the survey, or even splitting its content, so that while retaining its prior focus on the CAA’s ultimate customer (the public) it also provides more information from the aviation sector’.
After waiting a further 11 months, the planned supplementation of the ‘Feel Safe’ survey did not eventuate. Nor had there been any such client satisfaction survey providing information to the Authority from the general aviation sector.
So the GAA went ahead and conducted its own independent survey – the first such survey of CAA clients in the previous 15 years. The Authority was invited to collaborate in the GAA survey, but did not respond.
The results of the survey were conveyed to the Chairman, who merely dismissed them as 'inconsequential'”.
The disdain with which Gould ignored the opinions of hundreds of GA operators was mirrored by the arrogance with which he treated CAA whistleblowing staff. This was too much for his Minister, and that was the end of Mr Gould’s sorry chairmanship.
That’s the history.
Des concluded his letter to Ms Fredric by saying:
We note that in the intervening period, the previous Chairman and his Deputy have since left the Authority. The new CAA Board is hopefully working under a more enlightened and responsible leadership.
We now formally request that the Board gives full and earnest consideration to instructing the Chief Executive to re- introduce client satisfaction surveys on a triennial basis. We cannot accept that the cost of a client satisfaction survey or a lack of staff resources would be valid reasons for not carrying out such a survey.
The answer was a very long time coming, but we have now been told by Ms Fredric that the CAA’s leadership team is seriously considering the re-introduction of client satisfaction surveys. Along with that, there was a conciliatory acknowledgment that relationships with aviation participants have been fraught at times and that a closer engagement with stakeholders is a key focus of the Board and the leadership team.
Is there cause for optimism? Is this an indication of the more enlightened, progressive and responsible leadership
we hoped for?
Once again, only time will tell.
And finally, here’s a gender mind-bender...
A certain CAA employee, who shall remain nameless, has a very puzzling signature.
It’s something like “XXXXX XXXX she/her, Chief Assistant to the Assistant Chief”. This person has thoughtfully added a hyperlink in their email footer.
Our only questions are:
1 – Why does this person imagine that aviators are in the slightest bit interested in the sexual orientation of a CAA employee?
2 – Aren’t there some very important issues that this person should be spending their working time on instead?
Kind regards, and thank you for your support
Des and Brian
June 2020 Bulletin
Fellow aviators
It’s official: The CAA is toxic – but will it get a detox?
Cast your mind back to 2018 and you may recall the saga of the CAA Client Satisfaction Survey and how the
Authority’s leading lights rubbished the results when the GAA ran a customer survey after the CAA refused to do the job.
The Director and CEO, Graeme Harris, rejected what GAA supporters said about his Authority after our survey of
opinion in 2018 and 2019. His compatriot, Board Chairman Nigel Gould - having spurned our suggestion that the
CAA conduct a customer satisfaction survey - casually dismissed the results of ours, which had overwhelmingly condemned the CAA’s performance.
It was obvious that the CAA, from the board level down, was refusing to acknowledge facts because it preferred delusions. Strange how some people are selective about the truth when it doesn’t fit with what they want to see or hear...
However, the truth doesn’t change simply because the CAA can’t stomach it. The GAA has often pointed out deficiencies in the governance of the CAA to various ministers of transport. The standard response has been that they have “full confidence in the CAA”.
Now the worm has dramatically turned. We have seen the previous chairman and his deputy leave the Authority under the darkest of clouds, while that ministerial confidence silently evaporated. Then, when the Director suddenly departed in March 2020, he left the office with more questions than answers.
Did he retire (as officially described) or did he resign (as certain sections of the media said) or was he forced out by politicians who knew what was coming to Graeme Harris and them?
Why did he quit at the moment New Zealand aviation was struck down by the Covid-19 crisis? Did his departure have anything to do with an impending report on a review of CAA culture sparked by CAA whistleblowers? Did it occur to him that his vision of an expanding CAA had been destroyed (along with most of his customer base) almost overnight?
In time, these and other important questions may be answered.
The doors of the Asteron Centre have also closed permanently on the Deputy Director General Aviation, Steve Moore, who is “taking time out” and the Chief Legal Counsel, John Sneyd, who is now General Manager Building System Performance with the Ministry of Business, Innovation and Employment. Good career move, some might say.
When staff whistleblowers finally emerged to tell the public what the general aviation industry had been saying for years about the CAA, it caused a stir which was probably discarded by most of the public along with the fish and chip wrappers. But the GAA’s supporters had been saying much the same thing for a decade or more: the CAA was dysfunctional, too bureaucratic, too expensive, punitive and oppressive.
The common keyword from staff and customers of the CAA was: “Toxic”.
The review of CAA culture didn’t mince words. It agreed with the whistleblowers and the definition of toxic.
The CAA is now said to be undergoing a period of “organisational transformation”. Those of a cynical nature may suspect this to resemble the reorganisation of deckchairs on the Titanic, as the mighty liner sinks.
With much of the old guard having been swept away, let’s briefly look at the new brooms.
On paper, the recently appointed CAA Acting Director and Chief Executive, Shelley Turner, seems well qualified to effect a long-overdue change of culture. She has come from the New Zealand Intelligence community where she was Deputy Director General and led a programme of “transformation across the organisation.” Just how successful that was, we may never be told. Prior to that, she was with the State Services Commission as Manager People and Development.
The CAA also has a new Deputy Chief Executive Officer, Mahanga Maru, who grandly claims: “I keep the skies of Aotearoa safe and secure. I lead the development and implementation of the CAA’s stakeholder engagement strategy and plan. I oversee and co-ordinate the CAA’s relationship with key stakeholders.” Prior to joining the CAA, he spent some time as Chief Maori Advisor with New Zealand Petroleum and Minerals, where he was “responsible for advising his colleagues and stakeholders how to effectively engage with whanau, hapu and iwi to achieve mutually agreeable outcomes”.
We note some cringe-worthy corporate-speak, but there is – encouragingly – also some flying experience, since he qualified as a flying instructor in 1990, and has played a leading role in the resurrection of the Ruatoria Aero Club and airfield. GA stakeholders are looking forward to hearing from Mr Maru.
Janine Hearn, the Deputy Chief Executive Aviation Safety, also comes from a Human Resources background after spending time as GM, People and Culture with the Mid-Central District Health Board and before that, GM, Human Resources at Worksafe.
One might be forgiven for believing that the Authority is now being driven almost exclusively by an HR-orientated executive structure. (And what an odious term is Human Resources; humans are sentient beings, not commodities.) There is scant evidence of in-depth aviation experience among the recent senior appointees.
Can we nevertheless hope for a leaner, lighter, better-balanced aviation administration that manages its affairs more efficiently and takes much better care of its core customers? Dare we hope for a less authoritarian, made-to-measure, radically reformed and perhaps renamed Civil Aviation Administration of New Zealand? Less dictatorial, more all-encompassing, less bureaucratic, more friendly?
Only time will tell whether any meaningful changes occur with the relationship the CAA has with its GA clients.
But there is room for a smidgeon of optimism...
Dear Ms Fredric, we’re clients and we’re not satisfied
CAA Acting Director Shelley Turner greeted the damning report on her Authority’s “culture” with much aspirational talk, which amounted to a promise of internal change and eventually closer relationships with the “stakeholders”.
So we thought it might be a good time to resurrect the ancient idea (abandoned decades ago by the CAA and resisted by it ever since) of the Client Satisfaction Survey.
Bright-eyed and ever the optimist, GAA co-principal Des Lines wrote to Board Chairperson Janice Fredric about this back in early March, providing her with the detailed background to this issue. He told her:
“The GAA has always believed that client satisfaction survey findings should become an important part of the CAA’s business planning, highlighting areas where it is doing well, as well as those that need to be focused on and improved. A client feedback system also provides valuable information to not only the CAA Board, but also senior managers can use it to gauge the performance and effectiveness of the departments they administer.
As a result of what appeared to be widespread dissatisfaction among General Aviation (GA) pilots and operators with the Civil Aviation Authority (CAA), in 2016, we began making enquiries.
A CAA client satisfaction survey in 2003 had shown areas where clients were critical of the Authority’s performance. The 2010 Martin Jenkins Value for Money Report on the CAA also identified persistent failings.
In May 2016, we wrote to the CAA Director, noting that the Authority carried out a client satisfaction survey in 1998 and another in 2003. Colmar Brunton Research ran both these surveys and, prior to the main survey, it first conducted a series of in-depth, exploratory, qualitative interviews with slightly more than 300 CAA customers.
We also noted that there appeared to have been no further CAA client satisfaction survey conducted since 2003, on what had seemed to be an established five-yearly cycle.
The Director chose not to reply, and instead sent the letter to the CAA’s Official Information and Privacy Officer.
In June 2016, the officer advised us that:
The Client Satisfaction Surveys conducted in 1998 and 2003 were seemingly brought about as a performance measure under agreement with the Minister of Transport. When this agreement ended, new performance measures would likely have been established with different methods of determining performance.
The CAA has continued to conduct various public opinion surveys, with Colmar Brunton’s assistance, but for different reasons. For example, the Feel Safe Survey was conducted in 2011, 2013 and 2014 in order to determine how safe people feel whilst flying and to gage (sic) their impressions of CAA and AvSec’s effectiveness.
The 2013 survey was a Feel Safe survey and not a client satisfaction survey.
Lacking a substantive response from the Director, we wrote to the CEO of the Ministry of Transport.
In a letter of 22 December 2016, Peter Mersi, CEO of the Ministry of Transport at the time, replied:
I note your comments about the merits of conducting client satisfaction surveys and your suggestion that the Ministry should instruct the CAA Board to undertake them (among other things). Whilst I understand the reasons you have suggested this, this would not be consistent with the legal framework for Crown entities. You may be aware that this covered by the Crown Entities Act 2004, and responsibility for the operation of a Crown entity rests with the Board of the entity. Accordingly, it is up to the Board of the CAA, which makes delegations to its Chief Executive, to determine the type of surveys it undertakes.
We followed the advice of the Ministry and took the issue up with the board. In a letter of January 2017 to CAA Board Chairman Nigel Gould, we asked similar questions to those we had asked the Director and pointed out the lack of substantive detail in the OIA reply around the words ‘seemingly’ and ‘would likely have been’.
Gould replied, saying:
‘Your interest in surveys is topical, as the CAA will shortly be repeating its flagship ‘Feel Safe’ survey conducted by Colmar Brunton. Management are currently planning on supplementing the survey, or even splitting its content, so that while retaining its prior focus on the CAA’s ultimate customer (the public) it also provides more information from the aviation sector’.
After waiting a further 11 months, the planned supplementation of the ‘Feel Safe’ survey did not eventuate. Nor had there been any such client satisfaction survey providing information to the Authority from the general aviation sector.
So the GAA went ahead and conducted its own independent survey – the first such survey of CAA clients in the previous 15 years. The Authority was invited to collaborate in the GAA survey, but did not respond.
The results of the survey were conveyed to the Chairman, who merely dismissed them as 'inconsequential'”.
The disdain with which Gould ignored the opinions of hundreds of GA operators was mirrored by the arrogance with which he treated CAA whistleblowing staff. This was too much for his Minister, and that was the end of Mr Gould’s sorry chairmanship.
That’s the history.
Des concluded his letter to Ms Fredric by saying:
We note that in the intervening period, the previous Chairman and his Deputy have since left the Authority. The new CAA Board is hopefully working under a more enlightened and responsible leadership.
We now formally request that the Board gives full and earnest consideration to instructing the Chief Executive to re- introduce client satisfaction surveys on a triennial basis. We cannot accept that the cost of a client satisfaction survey or a lack of staff resources would be valid reasons for not carrying out such a survey.
The answer was a very long time coming, but we have now been told by Ms Fredric that the CAA’s leadership team is seriously considering the re-introduction of client satisfaction surveys. Along with that, there was a conciliatory acknowledgment that relationships with aviation participants have been fraught at times and that a closer engagement with stakeholders is a key focus of the Board and the leadership team.
Is there cause for optimism? Is this an indication of the more enlightened, progressive and responsible leadership
we hoped for?
Once again, only time will tell.
And finally, here’s a gender mind-bender...
A certain CAA employee, who shall remain nameless, has a very puzzling signature.
It’s something like “XXXXX XXXX she/her, Chief Assistant to the Assistant Chief”. This person has thoughtfully added a hyperlink in their email footer.
Our only questions are:
1 – Why does this person imagine that aviators are in the slightest bit interested in the sexual orientation of a CAA employee?
2 – Aren’t there some very important issues that this person should be spending their working time on instead?
Kind regards, and thank you for your support
Des and Brian
