Aviation safety managers and employees who understand the real difference between reactive, predictive, and proactive risk management activities gain considerable benefit for generating good safety performance.
The fact is that these three types of risk management strategies are often misunderstood and/or confused.
Can you describe the difference?
Each type of strategy has particular activities and behaviors that are useful in different situations. We can understand the basic purpose of each type of risk management as follows:
Developing all three forms of risk management involves understanding your aviation SMS program and employees. Let’s look at what each type of risk management is, and situations when each type is useful. Here is a table that broadly shows the difference:
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|
Reactive Risk Mgmt |
Proactive Risk Mgmt |
Predictive Risk Mgmt |
|
Definition |
Actions in response to hazard/risk occurrence |
Actions that address perceived hazard/risk occurrence before it actually occurs |
Actions that attempt to forecast future, potential hazard/risk occurrence |
|
Management Activity
|
After hazard/risk occurrence, take measures (i.e., corrective actions) to prevent re-occurrence. Management does this by processing incident/accident reports and |
Before an identified hazard occurs, management creates control measures to prevent initial occurrence. Identifying these hazards usually happens through proactive activities, or by reviewing proactive reports. |
Analyzing current operations to identify areas of potential concern in future, hypothetical situations. This is done almost exclusively by reviewing existing systems and processes. |
|
Front Line Employee Activity
|
Once a hazard occurs, employees take action to prevent an accident. If risk occurrence is inevitable, employees take action to mitigate damages. These issues must be reported. |
Hazard mechanisms and threats are identified before hazard occurrence (and hazard occurrence is mitigated). These issues are generally "voluntary" reports, but it's a best practice to encourage employees to report these issues. |
N/A
|
|
Examples |
|
|
|
I can’t help but feel like reactive risk management has kind of a bad reputation in aviation SMS programs. It’s often perceived as the “lowest” or most basic form of risk management. This idea is propagated mainly because reactive risk management is generally associated with aviation safety programs that are:
A better term for the above would be “underdeveloped” risk management. Reactive risk management is extremely important for new AND mature safety programs. Programs without strong reactive risk management strategies are exposed to considerable risk. This is because reactive risk management is an essential element of:
Long story short, reactive risk management is the ability of all safety personnel to make good decisions without premeditation. Being able to do this takes years of experience and aviation risk management training.
Reactive risk management is best used as a strategy in the following situations:
High-quality reactive risk management is critical at all levels of SMS implementation. In particular, new SMS programs will deal with more safety events as they learn what they are exposed to.
Setting quality reactive risk management behavior early in implementation will prove to be extraordinarily beneficial as the program is implemented. Cultivating quality risk management requires:
Proactive risk management is often upheld as the highest form of risk management. This is because being able to demonstrate proactive risk management activities generally doesn’t happen until an SMS program is fairly mature.
The primary goals of proactive risk management are:
Being able to practice proactive risk management generally requires:
That being said, there’s no reason that new aviation SMS programs can’t partially adopt some proactive risk management strategies, such as monitoring a handful of leading indicators.
It’s important to remember that proactive risk management is not simply a concept or “better” version of reactive risk management. Proactive risk management involves specific activities that are entirely different from reactive risk management activities. Both reactive and proactive risk management complement each other, and each strategy is useful in different situations.
Proactive risk management strategies are best used in the following situations:
Like reactive risk management, proactively managing risk is the responsibility of front-line employees as well as safety management. Each sector of an organization has its own proactive behaviors that generate a solid, proactive culture in an aviation SMS program.
I see predictive risk management confused with proactive risk management all the time. While there can be overlap between proactive and predictive management strategies, they are for the most part distinct.
Predictive risk management attempts to:
Predictive risk management is largely possible due to the use of lagging indicators, or past historical performance, which is used to predict possible future performances. This is the exact opposite of proactive risk management, which uses aviation leading indicators to directly assess underlying causes and precursors to current performance.
Predictive risk management becomes extremely useful in the following activities that are common to aviation safety programs:
It’s important to understand that predictive risk management is useful for creating expected “ranges” of safety performance, and a framework for future risk exposure. Specific predictive risk management information should not be trusted to the same degree that, say, proactive risk management information is.
You will find the following free resources helpful for developing your proactive and reactive risk management activities
Last updated in May 2024.