Why are we here? LIVE — with Michael Bögle from Lufthansa Technik recorded at New Process Conference 2024
#050 Answering this question on multiple levels live at the New Process Conference.
In this episode, I’m talking to Michael Bögle about the question “Why are we here?”. It’s a super special episode because it’s not only the 50th episode of the New Process Podcast, but also the first live podcast recorded at the New Process Conference!
We take a look at this question on several levels — from the location, to the conference, to our personal purpose in life.
Today’s Guest:
Michael Bögle
He is Senior Director Management System & Authorities at Lufthansa Technik.
Michael developed and introduced the process-oriented integrated management system of Lufthansa Technik Group.
He is working for Lufthansa in different engineering and management positions since 1987 and holds a degree in aircraft engineering.
You’ll learn:
- WHY are we here
Resources
Get notified about new episodes:
Transcript
Please note that the transcript was generated automatically and only slightly adjusted. It does not claim to be a perfect transcription.
Mirko00:19
Yeah, welcome to episode 50 of the New Process Podcast. Welcome to episode 50 of the New Process podcast. This episode is going to be really special, not because it’s episode 50, but because we are recording this episode live at the New Process conference here in Seeheim. Yeah, thank you so much. So we are going to answer the question why we are here. Therefore, I’m to Michael Bögle. Michael, he developed and introduced the process-oriented integrated management system of the Lufthansa Technique Group. That’s where we met today.
00:57
Michael is senior director for management system and authorities at lufthansa technique. He has been working for Lufthansa in different engineering and management positions since 1987. Luckily, I’m a bit older than you were working for Lufthansa Quite impressive. He holds a degree in aircraft engineering and, even more interesting, he crossed Greenland on skis and he’s also ing a Barcamp session tomorrow talking about processes in the extreme. Just as a teaser, but you can pitch your session tomorrow on your own. I will do that. This is going to be a nice session, but there will also be other super interesting sessions, so wait for the pitch tomorrow. In this episode you’ll learn why we are here. So enjoy the interview or the conversation with Michael Bögle.
Michael01:53
Thank, you for having me.
Mirko01:59
Yeah, Michael, welcome to the New Process Podcast.
Michael02:03
Thank you.
Mirko02:03
Great to have you here and let’s find out why we are here. But first, as always, let’s start with a check-in. So what do you prefer in an aircraft, aisle or window seat?
Michael02:14
To be honest, it depends. I find myself, when I just want to get to a place, that I prefer an aisle seat, you know, because usually that means you can exit the aircraft, you know, quicker. If the flight is part of the journey, which is usually the case during leisure travel, when I’m on holidays, I tend to prefer a window seat. Yeah, but then, as you know, we don’t always have the choice the way we travel sometimes it’s just in the kitchen.
02:50
Yeah, well, sometimes even that. Yeah, sometimes it’s the jump seat or, yeah, if you’re lucky, cockpit, but yeah, that’s our fate. I guess that sometimes we we just don’t have the choice.
Mirko03:05
Yeah, and you take whatever you get yeah, I remember these times, yeah, so what is your favorite airport?
Michael03:14
Definitely Vancouver. I travel through Vancouver a lot and usually that’s uh, leisure travel. I’m on holidays and I use Vancouver as the first destination coming into Canada and then we go north from there. And I have a really special relationship to Vancouver because Vancouver was one of the first airports where I became aware of what they call the airport improvement fee, and whenever you had to go.
03:50
I think it was introduced in the 90s when they had upgrades, necessary upgrades so they came up with the idea of collecting the money from the passengers, which probably makes sense, but in the early days, rather than collecting the money through your ticket, you had to pay it separately, which made it even more aware for you. I think right now it’s for international flights or international departures. You’re looking at $25 Canadian dollars, family four $100. So that hurts. But because I was there so often, I feel that I financed part of that airport. So you know I I said to myself you better enjoy it and it’s a nice airport, it’s in a nice setting, nice views, and it’s they did it well, they spent the money well, I would say that’s good to know what was the best process you’ve ever experienced.
04:44
Can I switch the question to the worst? Sure, yeah, I would also have probably a good example, but I think I’ll tell you this one. This is also Vancouver, okay, and this was a boarding process, and I won’t tell you which airline, because it doesn’t matter. You know, we’ve all had these experiences where, when they make the initial boarding call, everybody gets up and I don’t know whether that’s a particularly German thing that you know they don’t care about. You know boarding groups or you know pre-boarding for families, everybody jumps up and this was particularly bad.
05:24
Like, really, everybody was up and a crowd formed around the counter and I heard two passengers talking to each other and the one guy said well, look at this, this is crazy. I hope they fly their planes better than they organize crowds. That’s what they, you know, he said, and I to me. That meant that, you know, by screwing up one part. You know, people have a tendency to relay that to other questions, you know, and of course, safety is paramount and always a concern. So when, obviously, these passengers said well, if they don’t manage to, you know, get the crowd under control, what about the rest? You know, I thought that was well at the time, funny, and of course they were laughing while they were saying that, so they were not really serious, but that was a definitely a bad example and it’s getting better. I don’t know. I hope everybody has the same or made the same experience lately that you know the boarding processes usually are well organized. Yeah, not always, but most of the time I can see people shaking their heads, which is obviously not always.
Mirko06:48
Yeah, I could tell you another story about A380 boarding process in San Francisco, so greetings to Harald, but that’s another story. We keep that private. So how would you describe your relationship to processes, your relationship to processes.
Michael07:07
Well, honestly, I’m convinced that a process-oriented approach is the only way to manage the complexity in large, highly regulated, safety-critical organizations. I don’t see how you would manage to get things under control in those environments. So, at least for us, we found this was the way to go. We came from a system where we had many, many different documentation spread out all over the place basically manuals and we found ourselves in a situation where we said it’s getting too much, it’s too overwhelming, and things started to go wrong. So we we thought about a different approach and this is what we found, and it seems to work so far yeah, pretty well, that’s good.
Mirko08:03
Okay, then let’s get into the flight mode here. Why are we here? Why are we two both sitting here today? And I think there are different layers you have to take into account to understand the answer. And the first layer I would say is why are we here in Seeheim? Why are we here Seeheim?
08:27
For me, it’s obvious because of the delicious food. This always counts for me, but there are more reasons. So, for me personally, I’ll tell you in a few seconds. But as I talk to some of you in the morning and told you that it’s more or less the heart of Lufthansa, that’s where you can really feel the Lufthansa spirit. It exists since the 70s and was completely rebuilt in 2008, 2009, I think and I spent here my first three weeks when I started working for Lufthansa. That was a very impressive time and, by the way, when you got upstairs, maybe you heard the noise coming from the left side. Was it still music there loud?
09:16
There’s the board meeting room at the end of the floor, so that’s where the board of the Lufthansa group also meets. I think they are having a party today, but they are also offering to rent the room to other groups, so maybe it’s not the board, I’m not sure and we had a lot of events here throughout all the years and for me, as I just said, I started here, I spent the first three weeks here in Seeheim and that was the beginning of my Lufthansa journey. I would say I came back from time to time to participate in trainings, other workshops. We organized a lot of events, conferences, here in the past, most of them internal, but already 10 years ago, external conferences. So it has always been like home for me.
10:13
When I left Lufthansa, I calculated how many nights I spent here throughout all the years and more than 100 nights in Seeheim. So my wife said, when we left Hamburg on Tuesday, it’s a bit like driving home. Or I said, yeah, it is. So when I just left the elevator, this noise and the smell when I entered the lobby was just super interesting, so really special for me. And Lufthansa is doing all the trainings here. So flying in employees from all around the world just to experience Lufthansa, to get together, to share experience and to learn from each other. And that’s basically what we are doing here today as well. We are experiencing the new process community, we are learning, we are rethinking processes. So I think that’s part of why we are here in Seeheim. What about you, Michael?
Michael11:10
Well, you mentioned and it’s actually called Conference and Training Center. So you mentioned the training aspect and that was what many years for me, Seeheim, was a place where you went for training, starting with personal development trainings and later was leadership trainings. And then, when we started this journey of becoming a process-oriented orientation, we implemented IQ Move now Pro-X it became a completely different meaning. As you said, it turned out to be a place where we meet with our colleagues, first of all within the Lufthansa Technik AG in Germany, and then, as we expanded the scope of IQMove Pro X to the companies of the Lufthansa Technik group, we had to come together with the colleagues working in those group companies. And then it went even further when we looked at the whole Lufthansa group. And of course, we also did training. We always, you know, there’s always a training aspect. I mean, we have Christian here, you know, and we recently came together and it was. It had a training part, but it was mostly coming together talking about new ideas, developing things. So completely different meaning, ask me.
12:46
or if I were to weigh the importance, I would say it’s a minimum 70 percent coming together and 30 percent training, maybe you know, of course there’s always the training aspect, but, like you said, it’s it’s far more than that for the Lufthansa group and for other companies as well that are now using the facility, which is, I don’t know to me, very unique in Germany, location wise. I mean, look at where we are, you know it’s, it’s special yeah, that reminds me of Stefan Lauer.
Mirko13:25
He has been chief HR officer of the Lufthansa group and at the event when the Lufthansa was reopened, he introduced it and he was talking about the new facility and he said make use of the facility. And, by the way, we have bigger beds now compared to before. So he was a funny guy. I really liked him and for me it’s super special. Just one fun fact. So when I was here attending one of the first trainee events in the beginning of my lufthansa career, which took place in the old seeheim in the bonhoeffer room, which is downstairs today also bonhoeffer room for bigger events with up to I don’t know 300 participants and so on.
14:14
So next year the process conference will take place downstairs. No, but I always had this target picture for myself One day, we’re going to organize an event with a size of 250 people to fill all three Bonhoeffer sections and I’m not sure, if you remember, in 2019, we had the pro x days downstairs. That’s where we also played the pizza game with more than 250 people, and unfortunately, you weren’t there in that session. And in the morning I took a picture with all the participants sitting there and I sent you a whatsapp message and said mission completed. Yeah, exactly that was the moment where I knew I’m going to leave the company because this vision was fulfilled. So it’s really special still too bad.
Michael15:09
And then I mean, we are to this day very convinced about the purpose of business process management. And we even went further. Like we remember we’ve. We founded the process management alliance, you know where. The purpose was to make the knowledge that we had gathered about process management, business process management, make that knowledge available to organizations in the social and education area. And we also had conferences, you know, under that umbrella in Seeheim. And we brought and this was something that I couldn’t imagine at the time when we started the early 2000s, that something like this would happen we brought members here from the city government in Hamburg.
Mirko16:02
Yeah.
Michael16:03
You know, as keynote speakers, yeah, we developed this relationship with those within the city government that cared about children that came from families where there was problems like drug abuse, things like that. So we also, yeah, lift the purpose that we saw in the topic of business process management there, besides what our professional application was really, and that I find that, looking back, was remarkable.
Mirko16:38
Pity that we couldn’t continue that’s true, but created space for other topics in my life. Yes, like new process and the new process conference. So why new process conference? And for me I said that already in the morning I had this really strong need to meet you in person. So there has been so many messages on linkedin. We had online sessions, but most of you I never met in person. So that’s that was my biggest motivation to start organizing this event, bringing you together, and the purpose of the conference is to inspire people for processes. So that’s what I’m doing with newprocesslabcom, with the podcast and also with the conference today. And, as I said, you are part of that community. You are at the forefront of EPM, you are the innovators, so you made it here to ZAM. You spent a lot of time to provide processes to your community, to your organization, and that’s fantastic. So I’m super grateful that we are here together today for the new process conference. Yeah so, michael, what about you?
Michael18:05
yeah, you know, I personally I believe that the feeling of being successful in your life rests on three pillars really what you do as a profession. You want to do a good job there. The topic that we try to foster right now is business process management, and I think we’re all aware of the fact that in order to drive that, we have to come together and you know, talk and develop ideas, you know, together.
18:45
So, from a from a professional perspective, that’s something that you know means that you, you come together if you want to do a good job in the area that we are focusing on right now. And then, of course, the second pillar would be your social life. Successful social life doesn’t have to be like a family not everybody has a family and children but normally you have relationships and you know if, if you’re happy with that, then that adds to your the feeling of living a successful life. And then, of course and that’s the last one, but I wouldn’t say the least important one you have to do something for yourself. You know you have.
19:32
You have to, I don’t know, as Viktor Frankl, the famous Austrian psychiatrist and neurologist, put it. You know, one way of finding meaning in life is set yourself a challenging task and try to manage that task, try to solve it. And I think it doesn’t really matter what kind of task it is. It could be anything, it could be walking across Greenland on skis, but it could be, you know, building ships from matches or no matter what. You know you, you try to achieve something for you.
20:12
So, coming back to the professional aspect, you know right now, if you want to be successful in that area, it means you have to come together, and you know, yeah, exchange views and drive the topic, and that’s what’s happening here, and that’s what’s happening here and that’s what I’m supporting, no matter in what environment, and you’re doing it, and we’ve always done that together, so it’s logical for me that I continue to support it and drive it, and I will do so as long as it’s needed. Yeah.
Mirko21:01
Yeah, I think that’s already quite close to the answer why we are here today, and I know you will provide some insights into your personal why and challenge tomorrow in the session. So it’s going to be quite impressive for me. I already talked about my individual purpose in the episode with Julia von Winterfeld just a few episodes ago, because she played a major role, had a major impact on my journey besides your impact, and she tried, or I tried, to contact my soul to find out why I’m here. It didn’t work out. But for me, these three core competencies you know I studied business information systems. I’m more of a technical guy, so it’s hard for me to talk to my soul, but I’m aware of my core competencies. You know I studied business information systems. I’m more of a technical guy, so it’s hard for me to talk to my soul, but I’m aware of my core competencies, and the first one is to open doors in the sense of solving problems. That’s what I’m also trying to do with new process being a , in German I say but bringing people together and taking pictures, that’s my third core competency. Today lena is taking the picture, so thank you very much. But what I mean with taking pictures is creating memories that inspire for the future.
22:29
So I had to develop a process purpose statement for my individual purpose in that course with Julia, and this is called creating inspiring experiences. So, in general, and I thought about what can I do? What do I know? I know about processes, so I tried to bring that together and try to inspire people for processes. So that’s basically what I’m doing right now and what I really enjoy and what I’m super thankful for that. You all are now here and make this purpose visible, touchable, feelable, discussing and so on. So that’s that’s super cool. So that’s the last layer of the answer why are we here?
Michael23:17
yeah, really we’re. I don’t know. It feels like we’re continuing a journey and we did so many things together in in the past, and so it’s just a consequence that we continue to do what we think gives us meaning and purpose in life.
Mirko23:39
So that would be my answer to why we are here, yeah, so maybe you now understand why we are here. Another question is why are you here? And this is where you can discuss in the get together now after the podcast. So thank you very much for listening here live. Michael, thank you very much for being my thank you for having me here and I’m really curious how this journey will continue. Thank you very much.
One Response
[…] out episode 50 of the New Process Podcast to listen to the full interview with Michael Bögle from Lufthansa […]