Mexico City International Airport
A bottom-up transformation that turned a workforce facing extinction into the reason the airport was kept, reformed and grown.
Enterprise transformation through JUBAP · Stewarded by The Integral Management Society / IMSV.org
Latin America’s busiest airport, activated from the base up under acute political uncertainty.
A national capability about to be demobilized
The client was the Mexico City International Airport (AICM) — the largest airport in Latin America, handling 44M+ passengers a year, and at the time one of the most punctual in the world.
The intervention landed in one of the most sensitive episodes in recent Mexican infrastructure. The New Mexico City International Airport (NAICM), a megaproject valued at roughly USD 13 billion, was already escalating in cost and tangled in governance tension and political instability.
That produced two crises at once. A national strategic problem: how to keep and modernize the country’s air infrastructure while the new airport’s future stayed unresolved. And a deep human problem: more than a thousand highly experienced, largely unionized airport workers — one of the largest concentrations of operational airport expertise in Mexico — faced redundancy, displacement or irrelevance, precisely when the country still depended on them. The engagement came shortly after the company’s work in another politically exposed national programme, the Chicontepec energy megaproject.
Four pillars instead of victimhood
A top-down transformation was unworkable: political signals kept shifting and the future operating model was undefined. So the route chosen was the opposite — make the workforce itself the engine, working through the union, from the base up, using JUBAP (first field-tested at Nestlé) adapted to an airport.
The usual path for a union in this position would have been confrontation — strikes, blockades, holding out for severance. The programme proposed active change management built on a few clear pillars, worked at every level with both management and the union:
There is an airport, right now — and our job is to make it work.
No victimhood. We are the national experts in the airport industry — and we will prove it.
We are a team — with a real management model, not just goodwill.
We act as hosts of Mexico — service, competence, international standards, safety and health.
The pillars changed posture before anything else: from a workforce waiting to be told its fate, to one demonstrating its own value.
Recover belief, then innovate, then modernize
Change management, in its deepest sense
Before innovation could be asked for, belief had to be recovered. Intensive workshops — often four-hour, emotionally demanding sessions — were run across the workforce to rebuild confidence, restore professional value and shift the cultural posture of the organization: from a threatened legacy structure to a strategic capability that still mattered.
Structured innovation through JUBAP
With confidence restored, innovation workshops let employees and supervisors surface concrete operational problems and practical improvements. JUBAP’s discipline allowed large numbers of people to participate without collapsing into chaos or a purely motivational event — ideas were filtered, structured and turned into actionable initiatives that respected operational continuity and low-capital constraints. The result: more than 200 change initiatives across operations, coordination, communication, maintenance, service, safety and workflow. One example: a simple coloured-bracelet assistance idea, later generalized into a broader «travel companion» service concept. This was paired with tailored improvement-project advisory, custom training, and a dedicated First Aid, Civil Protection and Integral Safety course.
Operational intelligence in the control tower
In parallel, the company supported the evolution of Operations-Center decision-making for slot and gate allocation through a decision-support / expert-system logic — helping the airport absorb around 30% more traffic on the same physical footprint, while beginning to prepare the operation for data modernization and future AI-enabled coordination.
The itinerary
Why the airport survived
The workforce stopped waiting for a political decision and started improving the operation it already had.
As the new airport’s budget ballooned past its initial USD 13 billion and kept demanding more, the calculus changed. In a confrontation scenario — blockades, stalled transport, a hostile base — the only realistic option would have been to pour still more money into the new airport, an expensive double burden for the country. Instead, decision-makers could now see a concrete alternative: an old airport visibly increasing its slots and capacity, generating its own improvement ideas, at a fraction of the cost — the programme worked at near-zero budget while the megaproject consumed billions.
When the NAICM was ultimately cancelled and the strategy pivoted, AICM was no longer an aging airport waiting to decline. It had already begun building a more activated, innovation-oriented, change-ready base — and the reformed existing airport continues today, operated by that same team. In the confrontation scenario, those experts would likely be at home or paid off, having lost the very thing they knew how to do.
The transformation did not wait for the future to be decided. It helped make a different future possible.
Measured, and felt by the people
Beyond the operational gains — more than 200 initiatives, +72% perceived workplace quality and productivity, ~30% more traffic on the same footprint, and sustained standing among the world’s most punctual airports — the workforce response was overwhelming:
The great majority spontaneously wrote a signed note of thanks to the organizers — a sample below.
In their words
I congratulate you on the interest you show in us. These courses have changed me positively, both at work and as a person. Thank you!
I feel proud to belong to this company. Thank you for this kind of course — we grow, and above all we put it into practice. Change is me, first.
These courses make me stronger as an AICM employee, to do our work with enjoyment and effectiveness.
I really liked the course, and I hope all staff not only take it but apply it to improve AICM.
Bottom-up transformation as a strategic instrument
In a politically unstable, mission-critical environment, this case shows that bottom-up transformation can be a strategic instrument, not just a participatory exercise. When top-down certainty disappeared, the institution recovered direction by mobilizing its own people, restoring confidence and turning operational experience into structured innovation.
It also shows that preserving and activating human expertise can be as strategically important as building new infrastructure — and that JUBAP, born in an industrial plant, transfers to a large, unionized, politically exposed public institution under real pressure.
This engagement and the methodology behind it are held within the JubAp ecosystem and stewarded by The Integral Management Society / IMSV.org.
Explore more Case StudiesFigures are drawn from the programme’s own evaluations and records and reflect partial, point-in-time counts. Testimonials are reproduced from signed participant evidence collected during the programme.