United employee's excuse "we were following established process"
The following quotation from Jeff Bezos is appropriate in this instance:
Jeff Bezos, 2017 –
"This can happen very easily in large organizations. The process becomes the proxy for the result you want. You stop looking at outcomes and just make sure you're doing the process right.” Gulp.
“It's not that rare to hear a junior leader defend a bad outcome with something like, 'Well, we followed the process.' A more experienced leader will use it as an opportunity to investigate and improve the process. The process is not the thing. It's always worth asking, do we own the process or does the process own us?"