Resilience and SMS
by Catalina9
Humans
are built with the unique ability to bounce back when things go wrong. Resilience
is one of the criteria for learning, improvements, goal achievements and
comprehension. Machines or automation does not come with resilience or the
ability to comprehend. When a process is without the ability to bounce back it
will continue in a randomly selective direction. A process without resilience
is like a bag of marbles being dropped on a level floor and they will travel in
any random direction. A Safety Management System has resilience within the
system itself with the capability for processes to take on the shape and
direction as needed for safety improvements. However, when emotions, incomprehension
or external forces are applied to SMS, the resilience is removed, and SMS takes
on an irreversible direction moving away from safety.
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Train tracks are without
resilience.
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When a basketball
player misses the hoop, the player learns how to improve the aim and when a
skier falls, the downhill skier learns how to improve shifting center of
gravity. There is no person in the world who can walk out on a basketball court
for the first time and become a champion, or a downhill skier that puts on
their skis for the first time to win the gold medal. SMS is in the same boat,
but unqualified SMS personnel are still placed in SMS positions. No wonder SMS
seems like a burden to airport or airline operators. An SMS without resilience
is a system without continuous safety improvements, comprehension of SMS or
expertise in leadership.
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| The old way of SMS was to remove a piece of the puzzle and expect a complete picture |
A
Safety Management System with resilience is a system where functional area
managers and technical expertise can access guidance material, decision making
processes and directions when arriving at the fork in the road. SMS is a system
that operates from within opposed to an external force acting on the system.
The old way of doing safety was to punish past personal job performance with an
assumption that this punishment would force an individual to take it upon
themselves to establish goals and goal achievement plans. It was assumed by
management and superiors that firing someone from their job would be a
deterrent for other individuals to do the same damage. In addition, this old
Safety Management System method enforced changes in behaviors based on opinions
and without support of facts or data. The old way of SMS did not comprehend resilience
and that quality personal job performance is proportional to training for skills
development, information, knowledge and comprehension of the systems. The old
way of safety is still alive in both large and small aviation organizations.
Some
years ago, this blog wrote about resilience in automation: “When human errors are concealed in automation, these errors may not be
correctable due to automation lack of performance resilience.” This
statement was based on simple SMS principles with the application of a risk
assessment with built-in decision-making processes. The Safety Management
System was sold to the aviation industry as a system that would prevent, or
even eliminate accidents. When an SMS is expected to prevent accidents, it could
easily become a system that promotes accidents since the risk-assessment itself
is a built-in complacent factor of the system. This does not imply that the
operator skips their monitoring and follow-up process, but that these
monitoring and follow-up processes are in its nature reactive. Automation has
become the complacent factor in SMS and the forgotten link. Without applying
the simple SMS principles to the development of software automation, there is a
system without resilience flying the airplane.
Catalina9
