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
As the former Commander of the International Space Station, it is not surprising that in interviews, Chris Hadfield often stresses the importance of effective risk management. Whether for career or pleasure, every aviator experiences a considerable level of risk. This is epitomized by the life of this former astronaut.
Nothing but the thin walls of a pressurized enclosure, hurtling through space at unimaginable speeds, lay between his small team onboard the space station and the cold eternity of space. In such circumstances, one small mistake could mean the difference between life and death.
Topics: 2-Safety Risk Management
This New Year’s celebration was filled with pride for the aviation industry because we heard that 2017 was the safest year on record for commercial air travel. The following week, news about the grounding of two senior pilots of a London-Mumbai flight surfaced in the headlines because of a fight in the cockpit, and subsequently, both came out of the cockpit, leaving the aircraft unmanned.
Topics: Safety Culture
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. Furthermore, it allows us to identify specific aspects of those issues and organize the issue however we please.
Generally, this organization includes:
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.
Moreover, “performance” isn’t just safety performance. KPIs can address performance for:
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.
These two on-demand videos offer:
