Application: Adapting the Steady Framework to the Jet Fuel Shortage
My colleague Stephanie Lemek has a line I keep coming back to: trauma-informed work is a lens that helps you see the world.
Once you put on the lens, you can’t easily take it off. You read a piece about organizational change and spot the missing psychological safety. You sit through an all-hands about a restructuring and notice the absent context. You watch a CEO video and think: that person is activated right now, and everyone in the audience can feel it.
And sometimes you read a piece about jet fuel, travel disruptions, and customer experience — and you see the whole thing, named by different words, aimed at a different audience, doing exactly the same work.
That’s what happened when I read Merkle Customer Experience Management CEO Chris Freeland’s recent piece in The Drum: “Amid the jet fuel crisis, travel brands face a customer experience reckoning.” It’s a solid article about how travel brands should respond when Europe’s jet fuel supply is under serious pressure and summer holidays are a few months away.
Freeland is addressing a marketing and CX audience. He’s not thinking about internal communications. And he’s certainly not thinking about trauma-informed anything.
And yet — there it is.
The setup
Summer travel isn’t casual for most people. They’ve saved money, approved annual leave, pre-booked hotels and transfers months in advance. For a lot of families, it’s the most important few weeks of the year. So when fuel supply disruptions start making headlines and cancellations become a real possibility, these travelers aren’t receiving that information from a neutral starting point. They’re receiving it inside everything they’ve already invested — financially, logistically, emotionally. The anxiety is already running before a single communication goes out.
Sound familiar? It should. Employees navigating a reorg, a round of layoffs, or a major strategic shift are in exactly the same position. They’re not reading your announcement fresh. They’re reading it inside everything they’re already carrying.
The Steady Lens
Steady is the six-principle framework at the core of the Internal Calms™ system. The name is intentional: the goal is to create the conditions for steadiness — in employees, in teams, in organizations — at a moment when almost nothing else is. The framework is adapted from SAMHSA’s foundational trauma-informed care work, which has been applied across healthcare, education, and social services as well as professions including architecture, UX, and law.
The six principles are Safety, Trust, Environment, Agency, Dialogue, and You. Here are the three I spotted in a piece about jet fuel.
Trust: PREventing Silence FROM BECOMING the story
Freeland’s core argument is that the lasting damage from travel disruption rarely comes from the delay itself — it comes from the silence. The uncertainty of not hearing anything from the airline or platform is what erodes the relationship. His argument isn’t that travel brands should pretend to have answers they don’t. It’s that they need to say something — honestly, and early — even when the something is “we don’t know yet.”
In Steady, Trust means communicating with honesty, especially about what you don’t know. Trust is relational — it exists in the space between the communicator and the audience, and every message either builds it or erodes it. The absence of communication doesn’t feel neutral to someone who is already anxious. It feels like confirmation that something is wrong.
The same is true internally. The all-hands that gets canceled without explanation. The leadership message that never comes after a visible business setback. The weeks of silence between a rumored reorg and an official announcement. Employees fill that silence with something, and it’s rarely optimistic.
Environment: Reading the room before you hit send
This is where Freeland gets specific in a way that translates almost directly. He recommends that travel brands audit their scheduled communications for contextual fit — because what was queued up weeks ago may no longer match the reality customers are living in right now.
In Steady, Environment means factoring the full context of your audience’s lives into your communications strategy. The conditions people are living and working within shape how every message lands — and those conditions change.
The “Only one week until your upcoming trip!” email that goes out while customers are reading cancellation headlines isn’t a lie. It’s just catastrophically unaware of the moment. Scheduled optimism in the middle of visible chaos is its own kind of failure.
Organizations do this with employees constantly. The quarterly all-hands that rolls out the company values video while a round of layoffs is still being processed. The “we’re so excited about this change” announcement that lands the week after the reorganization nobody asked for. The newsletter celebrating a product launch during a week when half the workforce is waiting to hear if their role still exists.
Freeland’s fix: review everything in your queue before it goes out. Does what you’re about to say match the reality your audience is living right now? Same fix, same question, same stakes.
Agency: Give people somewhere to go
Freeland recommends that travel brands build a dedicated resource hub — clear information about what customers can expect, what steps are being taken, and what options are available. The goal is to give panicked people something concrete to do with their anxiety rather than leaving them to spiral in uncertainty.
In Steady, Agency means giving people real options for how they access and consume information. Under stress, people process differently. Agency respects that variability and restores a sense of self-direction when circumstances are threatening to take it away.
A travel brand that says “here's what we know, here are your options, here’s how to reach us” designs conditions where customers can feel a degree of control in an upredictable environment. Same for internal communications. Telling employees what they can do — not just what is happening to them — restores orientation in the middle of chaos.
What this means for how you read the world
I’m not arguing that the travel industry has secretly gone trauma-informed. Freeland is writing good CX strategy. He’s not working from a trauma-informed framework.
But Stephanie is right: once you have the lens, you see it everywhere.
The instincts that make for excellent customer experience communication during a crisis — honesty about uncertainty, recognition of what’s at stake, real options for action — are the same instincts that make for excellent employee communication during a crisis. The nervous system responding to a canceled flight and the nervous system responding to a surprise reorg are running very similar processes.
The difference is that we’ve built an entire field of CX practice around the idea that external audiences deserve communication designed for their actual human experience. We are still, in many organizations, treating internal audiences like they should just be grateful for the update.
Steady is a framework for closing that gap.
Steady is part of Internal Calms™, the trauma-informed communications methodology from Equilibrious Communications. If you're applying this in your own work and want to think through how it maps to your organization, I’d love to hear from you.