By Rudy Pont, Air Safety Committee Coordinator

While the introduction of safety management systems has given safety departments the same (economic) language to talk to their management, it seems as if the numbers are now all that matter.

Everything needs to be measured, put into performance indicators and be monitored. Unfortunately, this obsession with statistics has moved the focus away from the actual stories behind the numbers and more importantly away from the front-line personnel. Sure, data is important, but it is much more important to know the story behind the data!

Nowadays when a trend is discovered, expensive consultants are hired to come up with miracle solutions that are made up behind an office desk. This often leads to new rules and procedures which often do not solve the problem, but instead create double binds and increase the efficiency-thoroughness trade-offs by those doing the actual work. In other words, solutions that look good on paper make the work even more complex in a context filled with competition, performance targets and ever more demanding commercial pressure. This creates a gap between employees and management which is devastating for the safety culture within the company. People have the feeling that they are not heard and become disconnected.

The only way to re-connect is to talk directly to your front-line personnel. Put the effort in understanding the gap between the work-as-done and the work-as-imagined, -prescribed or -disclosed. In short to find out what is really going on in your daily operations. This mindset will inevitably result in a more qualitative approach (compared to the quantitative one mentioned before). Yes, it will mean more (and especially different) work for the safety and operational departments but listening to frontline professionals and acting upon their needs (or explaining why you cannot) will bring a new drive and a real safety culture based on systems thinking and a Just Culture.

Organisations that take safety seriously invest in safety at all levels. Unfortunately, many companies (and authorities) continue the old blame game (it was ‘human error’) which is nothing more than a label, explains nothing and worse of all does not remove the systemic causes that caused the problem in the first place. Learning is the key. Let’s make it easy to do the right thing; difficult to do the wrong thing; and extremely difficult to do something catastrophic! But it takes courage to turn things around and truly invest in people because it is often difficult to prove the return on investment (‘How to prove that you avoided an incident if it didn’t happen?’).

Here Safety-II (understanding why things go right) can play a major role in understanding how things that already went well could go even better. By re-evaluating procedures, providing tools and (in some cases) restoring authority to the human operator, resilience can be built from the inside-out rather than as a patchwork of safety nets. This doesn’t mean we should stop doing Safety-I. Of course, we should continue to learn from incidents and accidents and heaven forbid we should remove everything that brought us an enviable safety record in aviation. But it may be useful to better understand the role of the human operator, who although fallible, currently still is the only real-time flexible system. Besides, safety and efficiency often go hand in hand. If it is clear that what is being done in safety benefits overall efficiency, then it should be easy to understand that safety is about people rather than numbers.