I asked 50 airline operations controllers the same question: “How many different systems do you log into during a 12-hour shift?”
Average answer: 11 systems.
One dispatcher told me something I can’t stop thinking about: “By hour 8, I spend more energy remembering passwords than making decisions.”
Another said: “I maintain my own Excel spreadsheet because it’s less painful than using the three ‘integrated’ systems that supposedly do the same thing.”
That’s when I realized: We’ve been solving the wrong problem.
We thought the problem was integration. Or training. Or change management.
But neuroscience just revealed what’s actually happening: When researchers put people in brain scanners and showed them prices, the insula activated. That’s your pain center. The same region that fires when you get hurt. Your brain experiences friction as pain.
Every login. Every system switch. Every piece of data manually transferred. Your brain doesn’t just recognize these as inconvenient. It processes them as losses. As injuries.
And like any rational organism, it learns to avoid the pain.
We call those workarounds “expertise” and “tribal knowledge.” What they actually are: neural adaptations to pathological system design.
Think about what this means: An ops controller at 3 AM, hour 10 of their shift, facing a complex decision. Their cognitive capacity is already compromised by circadian rhythm.
But before they can even apply judgment, they have to:
→ Navigate 4 different systems
→ Reconcile conflicting data
→ Remember which interface uses which logic
→ Manually synthesize what should be automatic
Every one of those steps triggers the brain’s pain response.
By the time they reach the actual decision, their cognitive account is overdrawn.
And we wonder why errors cluster during night shifts and irregular operations.
The real question isn’t “how do we get better integration?”
The real question is: How much are we paying in cognitive currency—and what’s the exchange rate to safety, efficiency, and optimal decisions?
Operations professionals: What’s the most painful system transition in your workflow?
Technology teams: What would you eliminate first if you could start from scratch?
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