The Airport Bathroom Test: Why Strong Systems Break
Webinar
Background: A neglected airport bathroom can reveal how an entire organisation works. So can an ignored warning on a trading floor. These everyday failures offer a window into the hidden architecture of institutions: what gets noticed, what gets acted on, and what remains unresolved.
Drawing on The Airport Bathroom Test, with cases ranging from airports and aircraft carriers to financial institutions, Djellil Bouzidi explores how organisations sustain their ability to detect, verify and correct problems. He examines how time, trust and cooperation shape resilience, and why institutions can lose the ability to act on what they know. The session also considers AI agents: who has the authority and practical ability to stop them, and can they act before the damage spreads? Participants will leave with concrete questions to assess their own institution’s capacity to correct itself.
Speaker:
Djellil Bouzidi, PhD, is an economist, founder of Emena Advisory and Senior Adviser at Bankers without Boundaries. He supported the structuring of the world’s first sovereign sustainability-linked bond, issued by Chile in 2022. He co-authored L’innovation financière au service du climat (2017) with Professor Michael Mainelli and is a member of France’s Autorité de la statistique publique. His latest book is The Airport Bathroom Test: Why Strong Systems Break and What Builders Do Differently (2026).
Speaker(s):
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Djellil Bouzidi
Founder
Emena Advisory
Chairman:
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Professor Michael Mainelli
Chairman
Z/Yen Group