But the alternative is treating this as a PR problem and fixing it at the surface. And I've seen what the surface looks like. I know what's underneath it, and I'm not willing to leave it the way it is. The room was quiet for a moment. Then Carver said, "All right."
And moved to the next item, and Sloan sat at the head of the table in the same chair she'd occupied for 6 years, and felt something she hadn't felt in that room before. Not confidence. She'd always had that. Maybe too much of it. Something more complicated, something that felt like being present in the actual situation rather than managing it from a safe distance.
It was uncomfortable and it was real. And she was starting to understand that these two things were connected. Outside the windows of the conference room, the tarmac was gray under a March overcast, and the morning crew was moving equipment in the slow choreography she had spent months learning to read. She knew most of their names now. She was still learning what that meant.
Spring came to the city in the tentative way it always did in that part of the country. A few warm days followed by a cold snap that reminded everyone not to put their heavy coats away yet. Then another stretch of sun that finally by midappril seemed to mean something permanent. The trees along the street outside Asterion's main facility put out their leaves in the particular pale green that only lasts 2 weeks before deepening. And the morning crew started propping the side door of the hangar open to let in the air which smelled like wet earth and engine exhaust.
And on the right kind of morning, something almost like hope. Sloan noticed the door being propped open for the first time in her second month of early shift visits. She filed it away. Small things were starting to mean more to her than they used to. The board meeting in late March had gone.
The way board meetings went when a CEO held her position firmly and the numbers were good enough to absorb the cost of the friction. Aldrich had written his notes and Carver had moved on and the remaining members had followed in the direction of least resistance which was usually the direction of whoever in the room was most certain. Sloan had spent 6 years cultivating that certainty as a management tool. She was still certain. She just wasn't certain about the same things anymore.
And the board hadn't entirely caught up with the difference. What they had noticed by late April was the safety metrics. The internal safety reporting had increased by 31% in the first quarter since Sloan had revised the protocol. Not because more things were going wrong, but because people had started reporting things that had always been going wrong and previously hadn't been worth the paperwork and the potential blowback. Three minor issues that would have sat unressed for weeks got caught and resolved in their early stages.
The maintenance review cycle that Caleb's replacement protocol had inspired. She had taken his documentation style and formalized it into a companywide standard with Howell's input was already cutting fault discovery time in the avionics and hydraulics departments. Carver called to say the numbers looked promising. Sloan thanked her and meant it only partially because she knew the numbers were a reflection of something that had cost more than a quarterly metric could capture. And she wasn't ready to let the board feel good about it as though they'd been part of the decision.