The life cycle of hazard and risk occurrence is the entirety of an adverse event that happens in your company.
This life cycle has distinct stages that you can identify in any given event.
To put it in James Reason Swiss Cheese Model terms, the hazard/risk occurrence life cycle is the holes, the cheese, the mice, and everything in between.
Understanding this life cycle helps you answer important questions about safety events like:
Topics: Quality-Safety Management
Roughly four out of every five aviation safety programs struggle with employee involvement. In many ways, the struggle is linked to the economics of SMS.
“Economics of SMS” is simply another way of saying that incentives play a crucial role in employee safety performance.
When employees feel and can see that someone is watching their safety performance – in other words, that their performance matters – they will usually shift their behavior to comply with expectations. Why?
Topics: Quality-Safety Management
Definitions are important.
Definitions guide us and help give structure to imprecise, vague, or nebulous risk management processes.
Having an accurate understanding of definitions allows us to have an accurate understanding of the structure of issues.
Topics: Risk Management Training
Despite the having the word “economic,” the economics of SMS are not concerned with money.
Rather, the economics of SMS look at continuous improvement from the standpoint of incentives.
Incentives play a powerful role in your SMS, for better or worse. Safety programs with good incentives generally have employees who:
Topics: 4-Safety Promotion
Safety culture is a word you see all over the place in aviation reference resources.
"Safety Culture" is used in different contexts and seemingly in very different ways.
Sometimes we say safety culture, and what we mean is hazard reporting culture. Sometimes we mean safety communication transparency. Sometimes we mean a lack of safety culture.
Leading indicators measure the safety inputs of your aviation safety management system (SMS) activities.
Safety inputs are the behaviors, attitudes, skills, and other factors that lead to safety performance outcomes.
Safety outcomes are simply how well your organization mitigates hazard/risk occurrence as they arise in your operational environment.
Key performance indicators (KPIs), also known as Safety Performance Indicators (SPIs), are data metrics used to track performance in your aviation safety management system.
In the case of KPIs, “performance” is the most important measurement to measure the success of your SMS.
Management of change in aviation SMS is a formal process for implementing system-level changes in aviation SMS programs.
By system-level, we are talking about a change that is significant enough to affect the design of your SMS.
Small changes only affect one small part of your SMS, such as single risk control, and are implemented with corrective-preventative actions (CPAs). System changes are a higher level of change that affects multiple areas of operations.
Key Performance Indicators (KPIs), also called SPIs (Safety Performance Indicators), are data metrics that indicate the baseline performance of your SMS for managing safety. The term Key Performance Indicators is indicative of the scope of KPIs:
Topics: Key Performance Indicators
If you’re reading this, it means you are considering or curious about what it takes to switch your safety management system. But, what are we talking about when we say “switch” your SMS program. There are a couple of possible scenarios that you should consider:
Topics: Aviation SMS Implementation
These two on-demand videos offer:
