There is a system installed.
No one can change it as it is installed top down and the paranoid sits on top. It’s all about power and the infamous ‘divide et impare’ is applied to retain the power. The absence of modern leadership qualities wouldn’t matter too much if on the lower levels you only have home grown equally immature subjects.
The pilots group however, is the one group containing way more professional who were trained in a more modern environment than any other in this society. Knowing this and knowing about his own inadequacies, the paranoid leader can either adopt a learning and adapting attitude or he can revert to the medieval repression through power system that oppresses any criticism, therefore no change will happen. It’s management by mushrooms: Everything sticking its head out of the turf gets chopped. We know what the choice is.
The second and third level of management is either as inadequate as the leader, or it adapts and adopts the same methods. Any new and good ideas get very quickly diluted and the individual disillusioned. Advancements happen only through adapting to the lowest common coercion denominator and not through competence. Such a system has proven to work for quite a long time, but each and every one has failed, just as any dictator will eventually fail. It’s all a matter of time and ability of the lower levels to cover up the mess. Quite often the leaders get their sandals polished and their paranoia upheld by them, simply to keep that privileged position in the unhealthy food chain.
On the front the symptoms of such a archaic system are loss of interest of the average employee, he performs to a very low percentage of his capacity and customer service becomes a nuisance. He will be led by coercion which means that superiors no longer thrive for a better product, but use up all their energy to bully their subjects and cling to their seat. The top guru will not be informed, he wouldn’t listen anyway, the statistics bent and the system failure deferred until it implodes with a big bang. The blame will then be put on everything but the paranoid.
The pilots group is somewhat different, that’s the reason why some symptoms show much earlier. They could be used as warning signs, however with the wrong man at the top, they are diligently disregarded.
The high upgrade failure rate is a huge warning sign. Why? Because upgrade does not happen through favoritism or creeping up something (maybe only a little number though), the selection through competence and experience should take place. This however means a basic threat to leaders, as the competent could expose his inadequacies. To avoid too much of a change, he will install filters that weed out such danger. Filters are HR, Psych department, guys like SP and so on. With a halfway acceptable training department even such filters allow some competence to be applied for advancement, but in the process the subjects are intimidated to the point that they will never question any directives from above, during training and once passed.
Therefore they become EK captains who are easily led by the wish of the incompetent paranoid. The EK books give a captain final responsibility, but if he applies it where the company does not like it, even strictly by the book, he is punished. This as long as everything goes well, the moment something happens, the leaders will instantly hide again behind their books and punish him just as much.
Such a system is very handy for the company. It would however be exposed by unions or the public in civilized countries. Not that it works fine there, but the responsible pilot has at least some legal possibilities to defend decisions and expose coercion. Here the leaders are protected throughout all levels, whatever happens it will always be the pilots blamed and sacked.
All this leads me to predict that nothing will change.
Just live with it and hope you will not be on board when the shortcomings of such a system strike.