Unfortunately, the concept of Human Factors in aviation safety management systems (SMS) has historically carried an undeniable, negative impression about the role of human in safety issues (as well as other issues).
Just consider the synonymous term associated with Human Factors: "The Dirty Dozen".
Furthermore, the Dirty Dozen focuses exclusively on the negative aspects of human attitudes and behavior in safety incidents. In other words, in practical application, Human Factors are used as a problem to be controlled. This is increasingly an insufficient representation of human’s role in aviation SMS.
Without question, human behaviors and attitudes are probably the major driving force in:
However, humans are also an important barrier for:
Humans are both the problem and the solution. Keep in mind, here are some advanced uses of Human Factors in Aviation SMS.
The best way to advance your use of Human Factors is to begin accounting for positive factors during issue classification. Safety managers classify issues during the risk management process in order to group similar reports together to help detect trends over time.
Trend analysis in aviation SMS is an incredibly important topic. Detecting trends involves reviewing historical performance to predict future events. Trend analysis is a "Safety Assurance" activity and is central in predictive risk management, as managers use trending analytics as a primary tool to apply their risk management strategies.
As hazards are identified and issues are reported by employees and other stakeholders, safety managers will qualify and organize them with classifications, such as:
Organizations that classify Human Factors do so using the negative overtone of the Dirty Dozen, such as the following classifications for the Lack of Teamwork Human Factor.
For a given issue involving a lack of teamwork, a safety manager would use such a classification and associate it with the reported safety issue.
However, what about a situation where teamwork positively affected the outcome of the reported issue?
This data can and should be tracked in order to better understand the performance of the SMS. This way, the new classification tree would look like this:
In this way, issues can be positively classified and/or negatively classified. The result is a much better understanding of the complex, multiple ways humans contributed to the issue’s outcome.
In the above example, we use a flexible, configurable classification schema to organize reported safety concerns for future predictive risk management activities. During the management of the newly reported issue, chances are that you are practicing reactive risk management. Your efforts during this reactive risk management phase are preparing the way for you to more easily engage in the provocative, and often elusive predictive risk management phase.
If you study the configuration of the human factors classification scheme in the above example, you will immediately recognize that this type of classification is dynamic. It changes over time as new types of issues enter the SMS and safety managers shift their focus to more advanced topics.
Using an advanced human factors classification to easily group safety data requires an SMS database. This is the only sustainable option to use such a powerful predictive risk management tool. We are talking about the human factors classification scheme. This is impossible to pull off well with spreadsheets, even in very small aviation companies.
If you ever wish to routinely participate in predictive risk management activities, you will need an SMS database. If you shop around, you will find an SMS database that already has a default human factors classification schema integrated into the database solution. And to sweeten the deal, your SMS database will probably have very robust predictive risk management tools, like trending charts. Do I need to say any more about the importance of an SMS database if you wish to make it to the predictive phase?
Over time, using advanced Human Factor classifications gives you access to some rather unique data mining abilities through:
Just consider a line graph of the top 10 Human Factor classifications over the past year. Ideally, you would see a general rise in positive classifications and a decline in negative classifications.
Or consider a pie chart, where you can see the ratio of positive to negative behaviors that contribute to outcomes.
Considering how important humans are to outcomes, your SMS benefits immensely from understanding human performance.
While aviation SMS is traditionally rigidly top-down, there is a good argument to decentralize some of the authority by the Human Factors approach to safety. Very simply, it means relying on humans as the primary risk control to safety incidents.
It’s quite simple. It simply involves:
Another way of looking at it is giving employees more power and responsibility in order to make top-down-critical processes easier to perform. When employees participate in the SMS, they take ownership of the SMS. This in turn reduces organizational risk and improves safety performance.
Management has several important roles regarding the development, conception, and use of Human Factors:
Human Factors have large implications in safety culture. Assessing safety culture is largely a practice of assessing such factors.
Last updated July 2024.