Effective Collaboration and Consensus Building

By Naseem Khuri, Adjunct Assistant Professor of International Negotiations, Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy, Tufts University

I’ve had the opportunity to participate in several of ALPA’s Leadership Training Conferences, interacting with elected local council pilot leaders. For status representatives, it’s their responsibility to represent their pilots at the airline level and at local and national levels of the Association. In my years working with ALPA, one lesson keeps coming up: good communication with pilot members is critical. Not only do they need to be informed about what the union is doing on their behalf, but they need a forum to offer input and voice concerns. Applying ALPA’s philosophy of pilots serving pilots, reps and local executive council officers must understand the line-pilot perspective to serve effectively as union leaders.

This isn’t always easy to do. During this year’s conference, I introduced the challenges of collaborating with line pilots and fellow union leaders. As a labor organization, you’re successful when your members are unified. Key to this is consensus, reaching agreement with your members on a position to support or an action to take.

Achieving consensus is hard work. You’re trying to align various stakeholders with strong opinions—pilots of a local council, members of a pilot group, pilot volunteers—who have differing experiences, perspectives, and priorities. Consensus gets tricky because when we feel passionately about a topic, we tend to lead with our conclusion: “We need to say X” or “We should do Y.” When we do this, we ignore the stories that led to them.

The “ladder of inference” is a tool that tells those stories: we automatically select data from the billions of bits of information we’re exposed to every day, we run it through the lens that our experiences and beliefs have shaped, and we form our conclusions. To operate “at the top of your ladder” is to speak only at the level of conclusion, and we get confused and angry when we don’t understand how the person across the table doesn’t see it exactly how we do.

Certain factors keep us stuck at the tops of our ladders. Our conclusions are often reinforced by biases, our tendency to think or act in an unknowingly irrational way. There’s status quo bias, that inclination within us to resist change because it just represents loss. There’s anchoring bias, where we overrely on a single piece of information. And there’s confirmation bias, where we search for information that supports what we already believe and dismiss information that contradicts it. These biases make it harder to embrace new information and make more objective decisions.

Pilot leaders experience these types of tough conversations all the time. People use arguments to persuade others to their way of thinking and double down when they encounter resistance. Healthy debates deteriorate into arguments in which winning becomes the goal and collaboration is forgotten. Have you ever been in an argument where you completely forgot how the argument started, and it only became about “not losing”?

To overcome these forces pushing us toward unproductive arguments, pilot leaders should listen to members’ priorities as well as consider the pilots’ reasons for supporting them. They should understand their audience before using their arguments. If you don’t know where to point your arguments, you’re taking a risk by deploying them; members just might not care. At the conference, I encouraged pilot leaders to concentrate on inquiring, listening, and acknowledging to fully hear and appreciate member concerns.

Another key is to respect autonomy. When you ask someone to agree with you, you’re asking them to abandon any allegiance they may have had to their own conclusion. You’re denying their autonomy. We’re much more inclined to take care of a solution that we feel is ours. If it’s thrust upon us, we won’t take care of it, and it can fall apart over time. Consensus is only useful if it lasts.

In working with ALPA pilot leaders, I’ve seen how solutions can be achieved through building consensus—working across company lines, breaking down silos, sharing information, and listening to one another. Training new leaders to more thoroughly consider member motivation and interests as they develop group strategies will encourage the consensus ALPA needs to be successful.

This article was originally published in the March 2025 issue of Air Line Pilot.