Like aviation safety culture, proactive risk management is another part of aviation safety management systems (SMS) that a surprising number of people fail to truly understand. This creates missed opportunities and unfulfilled expectations that many aviation service providers can ill afford.
Setting the stage for proactive risk management in an aviation SMS is like painting a house. Safety teams
Once you start painting the house, you are committed to the process.
Just like proactive risk management, you will prepare and begin implementing your plan to increase proactive risk management activities. Proper prior planning will prevent subsequent poor performance. Your plan should start with the end goal in mind. What are you trying to achieve? Do you know?
Changing the color of the house is not easily done, just like changing a safety promotion campaign in mid-stream is also challenging. Painting a house can be performed much more quickly than switching an organization's risk management attitude from a reactive mindset to a proactive mindset.
Just like painting a house, once you lay the groundwork for improving your organization's proactive risk management activity levels, the color will remain the same until major work is performed to "change the color." Sure, you can make minor changes, just like our house analogy. For example, with a house, you can easily modify the color of the trim, just as you can modify operational areas for which to focus organizational proactive risk management activities.
And just like a house, if you neglect to maintain the SMS's proactive strategies, your proactive safety culture will slowly decay until you are back to practicing only reactive risk management activities.
Proactively managing risk involves specific types of tasks, attitudes, and behaviors.
A proactive level of risk management does not replace or supersede other forms of risk management, such as reactive or predictive risk management. It is not an “elevated” risk management level.
It’s simply risk management activities that develop in more mature programs because they have:
Looking at the whole organization, proactive risk management is:
Here are 4 activities that are at the center of proactive risk management in aviation SMS programs.
Before you can manage risk, you need to know what risk is. Basically, the risk is the point in a safety situation where safety control is lost. This is an important point to remember when considering risk management.
You also need to know what a precursor is. A precursor is:
Proactive risk management, by definition, would imply addressing potential safety issues before the problems actually arise and the hazard manifests itself. At its most effective level, this involves evaluating the behaviors, attitudes, actions, and environmental conditions that lead directly to risk. Addressing precursors to risk involves:
Having a solid handle on precursors involves understanding how root causes, hazards, and threats interact in your safety program. This is one extremely important activity in proactively managing risk.
Proactively managing risk controls means using precursor data to make appropriate changes ahead of time. For example, in an organization that receives a sudden spike in employee turnover at the beginning of the SMS implementation, a couple of risk controls they could implement quickly are:
Such risk controls anticipate the aspect of employee turnover that increases risk: unfamiliarity with the SMS and workflow at the new organization.
The ability to strengthen risk controls is one of the primary motivations for monitoring precursors to risk. Anticipating weaknesses in risk controls and fixing them before the related hazards manifest themselves allows the aviation operator to avoid or substantially mitigate most safety events that would otherwise be problematic. This is the proactive approach.
Proactive risk management isn’t just practiced by safety management teams. Risk management is an organization-wide effort against unsafe situations. It is absolutely critical that front-line employees understand this point.
Front-line employees need to understand that:
Emerging threats are hazards that, because of circumstances, suddenly increase the likelihood of becoming safety issues. If you are familiar with the Swiss Cheese model, emerging threats are “holes” in the cheese that are “lining up.”
Identifying emerging threats is essentially observing precursors in action. Front-line employees need to be drilled on precursors and know them as thoroughly as safety management. If employees don’t have the ability to identify emerging threats, then the program cannot possibly practice proactive risk management.
Budgets are obviously critical for every successful aviation SMS implementation. They indicate:
Commitment, tools, and training all directly correlate to overall safety in the following ways:
An aviation SMS is ultimately the responsibility of the accountable executive, not the safety manager. The accountable executive’s active role in proactive risk management is to provide the adequate budget required for thorough safety preparedness.
Lastly, let’s quickly look at the difference between the three types of risk management activities.
Leading indicators are the foundation of the safety metrics involved in proactive risk management. If you haven’t already downloaded our free list of leading indicators, this list will be of invaluable benefit towards proactively managing risk. I highly recommend that you review this list.
Do you need tools to take your company from reactive to proactive risk management? SMS Pro has all the necessary tools, including a very nice Proactive Hazard Analysis Tool and Hazard Register.
Since 2007, SMS Pro has been working with aviation service providers around the world. We provide an SMS database and support personnel to allow operators to focus on their mission, while we focus on managing their SMS data.
Last updated in August 2024.