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.
Adopting leading indicators is very helpful for organizations because they:
Leading indicators are given in the forms of metrics, such as:
As we'll see shortly, leading indicators are usually a composite of two highly correlated pieces of safety data.
To create leading indicators, your company should have a significant number of different safety data. While this is not a requirement for all aviation leading indicators, it is a requirement for most.
A good place to start with leading indicators is to adopt (as in the list above) a few leading indicators early on in your SMS implementation. This practice allows safety management teams an opportunity to plan on data requirements, such as:
For example, if you are interested in tracking how many corrective actions and investigations were completed on time, the safety team knows that they will need to keep track of the start and end dates. Where will they store this information? On a spreadsheet on their personal computers? That is an accident waiting to happen, and spreadsheets are not a sustainable solution, especially if you are a company with more than 60 employees. I wouldn't want to store any SMS data on a spreadsheet. In Europe, you are no longer allowed to store safety report data on spreadsheets. EASA requires a database to store safety report data.
Early on in your SMS implementation, you may not know "what you don't know." You could spend four years developing a mature SMS implementation only to learn you haven't collected any data metrics to demonstrate continuous Improvement of the SMS. A best practice is to adopt a low-cost, commercially available SMS database solution that manages all the SMS documentation requirements.
An SMS database already has predefined data points that have been developed over many years by aviation industry experts. Well, I hope you look at solutions that were developed specifically to satisfy the SMS requirements. There is less risk that these products don't have the data points necessary to determine leading indicators. After all, you wouldn't take a knife to a gunfight. Choose the SMS database that was built to specifically address the ICAO SMS requirements.
Let's say you have your data management requirements completed and you have an SMS database that tracks all SMS documentation data points. You are ready to start creating leading indicators from your collected data. Your leading indicators should align with your safety goals and objectives, so I don't expect the following examples to resonate with everyone.
Here is a list of 40 leading indicators to get you started:
Some examples of leading indicators to start with maybe:
These are leading indicators that require little historical data to get started. After this, the process for creating leading indicators is:
When you identify meaningful trends, you have identified important aviation leading indicators that you can use to predict performance.
Furthermore, identifying these trends allows you to use safety promotional and safety risk management tools to influence safety performance at its root level.
Aviation leading indicators measure the performance inputs of your SMS. Aviation lagging indicators measure the performance output. We’ve discussed input, but safety outputs are simply the hard numbers.
Hard numbers measure historical data, such as the total number of high-risk safety issues reported in the last year.
Leading indicators usually compare two or more lagging indicators in order to identify a trend and understand/predict future performance.
Lagging indicators identify one area of performance in order to understand the historical performance of the SMS.
Lagging indicators are what most aviation SMS develop through the use of trending charts, key performance indicators, and data analysis. The danger with trying to use a lagging indicator to identify future performance is the mantra:
In other words, lagging indicators are great for reports and letting stakeholders know how the SMS is performing.
Leading indicators are an indispensable risk management tool for safety managers to make good safety decisions for future planning. With valid, actionable safety metrics, leading indicators also provide department heads with actionable data to modify operations. For more information, see this article on leading vs. lagging indicators.
Leading indicators can make excellent key performance indicators (KPIs). Safety purists like to use another term for KPIs, which is "safety performance indicators (SPIs). We prefer KPIs because KPIs are used in quality management systems and I believe the more effective SMS implementations have integrated safety and quality management systems. My logic is that there is no sense in having two systems when one will suffice.
Regardless of what you call KPIs, they can make excellent leading indicators. However, many KPIs will not make good leading indicators, and many leading indicators will not make good KPIs.
Leading indicators make excellent KPIs ONLY IF a leading indicator is closely related to one of your company goals or objectives. In this case, leading indicators are better than their lagging indicator alternative.
For example, consider the following:
In the example, the leading KPI places a lagging indicator in context. The lagging KPI does not answer the question: does improved safety survey satisfaction data lead to better employee retention? The leading KPI DOES answer this question and is a better indicator of actual key performance.
A few helpful leading indicators that most aviation safety programs can adopt without sophisticated risk management tools are:
Furthermore, some of these leading indicators make many good key performance indicators.
You have seen how even our simple examples of leading indicators have simple to modest data management requirements.
The objective of your SMS is to stop the accident from happening.
To stop the accident from happening, many risk management activities require you to track key data over prolonged periods of time. The more data you have, the better. A good data analyst will tell you that there is no such thing as too much data, just like a fisherman will tell you that there is never a bad day of fishing.
Safety managers who are managing data in spreadsheets will not likely benefit from these predictive risk management topics. If you want to continue to live in a world where you are always putting out fires and are always reacting, then your SMS will need to move into proactive and predictive risk management phases.
While you can use spreadsheets in the proactive risk management phases, you really won't want to. It won't be pretty and it will be challenging for all but the very small operators. Yet I have seen it done. For predictive risk management, you will need a database, or I predict that you will be in the predictive risk management phase for only one year. Get an SMS database that adds value to the organization instead of having the SMS be a financial drain for the organization.
We can help you with all your SMS data management needs and help you achieve your SMS goals.
You may also find the following helpful for evaluating your SMS:
Last updated June 2024.