When Coordination Is the Intervention

During pandemic recovery, Toronto Pearson International Airport faced a challenge common to large employment hubs. More than 50 employers needed to rebuild a workforce that once supported over 50,000 people, all while competing for talent in a constrained labour market.

The scale of disruption meant piecemeal fixes were not enough. Clearance delays, fragmented onboarding, and uncoordinated hiring risked slowing recovery across the entire airport ecosystem.

Insight

When complexity is high, coordination becomes the intervention. Systems recover more effectively when organizations act through shared structures rather than independent processes.

‍

Insight In Practice

At Toronto Pearson, recovery depended on creating system-wide foundations that employers could work from:

- Aligning hiring and onboarding processes to reduce duplication and bottlenecks

- Creating shared training and certification pathways to streamline clearance and skills development

- Using common planning tools so employers could move in parallel, rather than in isolation

Coordination did not replace individual employer effort. It made that effort additive rather than fragmented.

‍

Case Example: System-Wide Workforce Recovery At Toronto Pearson

Opus Group worked with Toronto Pearson, the Toronto Region Board of Trade, and airport employers to co-design a system-wide workforce recovery strategy.

This work resulted in Taking Off Together, a workforce playbook that aligned hiring, onboarding, training, and retention across the airport ecosystem. The playbook serves as a shared planning framework supporting coordinated recovery efforts across more than 50 employers.

The approach helped reduce duplication, streamline workforce pathways, and secure $1.625M in Skills Development Fund support to advance priority recovery actions.

Closing Reflection

System rebuilding depends on shared action. At Toronto Pearson, coordination created the conditions for learning, adaptation, and progress across a complex, multi-employer workforce ecosystem.

‍See how system-wide coordination was designed at Toronto Pearson.

Quote of The Week

“In complex systems, the unit of action is the whole.”
-  Donella Meadows