Newsletters

February 2012

February 2012 Newsletter

Welcome to the Safety Management System (SMS) Partners' newsletter! This month's newsletter includes the following articles:

Why Traditional Safety Programs Cannot Achieve Continual Improvement
Addressing Latent Conditions ñKey to a Successful SMS
Safety Culture and Corporate Culture are Synonymous

If there is a specific SMS topic that you would like to read about, or if you have any questions, please send us an e-mail. And of course, if you like what you are reading, please forward this e-mail to a friend!

WHY TRADITIONAL SAFETY PROGRAMS CANNOT ACHIEVE CONTINUAL IMPROVMENT

Even with the extensive knowledge professional safety management has accumulated about accident prevention in the last 100 years, safety programs can still be ineffective. Consider the Challenger and Columbia accidents, the Sago and Massey Mine accidents, BP's Texas City Refinery explosion, the Deepwater Horizon disaster and the Colgan Airlines accident two years ago. The fact remains, almost 5,000 people are killed and millions more are injured on-the-job each year.

In nearly every mishap, one of the first things we hear or read is, "safety is our number one priority." Even though management claims a commitment to operate safely, the pressures of meeting production goals take priority. One reason is that safety is a requirement not an objective. It has been that way for a long time and unless we shift our approach and make safety and risk management an integral part of the way we do business, companies will continue to fail to deliver on safety when it is needed most.

Safety failures can be attributed to management's inattention in two areas:
1. A belief that compliance with safety specifications, rules or regulations is enough
2. Failure to create a strong safety culture and make safety a focal point

These two things are driven by management's embrace of traditional safety programs where compliance is viewed as enough to "check the box." Unfortunately, emphasizing only regulatory compliance will not contribute to the overall effectiveness of any safety program. In fact, any organization that takes that approach will stifle continual improvement of safety performance.

Total Quality Management (TQM)
If we look back to Bill Deming's approach to improving product quality and the introduction of TQM to Japan in the 50's, American companies had to transform their approach to quality management. They had to change their quality objective from being able to only meet specifications to continual improvement so they could reduce variation in the system. They also had to transform their whole management system. Now, quality is the key to survival, giving companies a competitive advantage.

Companies that went beyond specification compliance and adapted their business processes to deliver high-quality products and services at lower costs became more successful and profitable. The new approach to quality required involving every employee in improving all parts of the system. Companies now tap their work force at all levels to help solve quality and productivity problems. Management systems must also be innovative when it comes to taking care of customers with a quality product (think Apple and the iPhone).

But while the fundamental theory and approach to quality has changed, the same cannot be said about safety. There has been no event like the introduction of TQM in Japan to challenge safety management similar to what happened to quality. As a result, we have been content with refining and reforming, rather than transforming, the safety process. We tweak safety through the hiring of new personnel, safety training, safety inspections and audits, accident investigations, coaching employees and incentive programs to change unsafe behaviors. These may be worthwhile endeavors but are often done to check a box and fail to deliver continual improvement.

One can be hopeful that the introduction of Safety Management System (SMS) will transform the industry's approach to managing safety. However, some signs are disheartening as some operators and airports are not moving forward with SMS until the FAA publishes the final rule. The likelihood that the FAA will make any significant changes to what has been published is virtually zero, so these companies are missing a great opportunity to transform their organization and reap the huge benefits of making safety a focal of their business process much like they do with quality.

In today's economy, businesses are challenged to continually improve quality and they do it. At these companies, the most important thing an employee can do is share their knowledge about eliminating quality, productivity and safety problems in the system. Knowledge is always given voluntarily, so the de-motivating methods practiced in command and control will not work in this new environment. This is as true for safety as it is for quality.

Safety management vis-‡-vis SMS is fast, focused, flexible and friendly to address the variations in common causes in the always-changing processes and work environments. SMS creates a system in which employees experience autonomy and purpose. These concepts are absent in traditional safety management and prevents ownership of the safety program by employees, a step that is necessary for any safety program to be effective.

ADDRESSING LATENT CONDITIONS KEY TO A SUCCESSFUL SMS

The terms active and latent as applied to errors were coined by Dr. James Reason. Latent errors or latent conditions refer to less apparent failures of organization or design that contributed to the occurrence of errors or an accident. Latent errors are quite literally "accidents waiting to happen." In healthcare, latent errors are sometimes referred to as errors at the blunt end, referring to the person "holding" the scalpel. Active failures, in contrast, are referred to as errors at the sharp end, or the personnel and parts of the system in direct contact with patients.

Every aviation accident has two components: active failure and latent condition. An active failure has an immediate adverse effect, and if you inhibit an active failure, you usually can prevent that mishap from taking place. For example, a mishap that was due to mismanagement of equipment may have been prevented by another person had they taken action or recognized the adverse condition and alerted the other person of the impending failure.

Latent conditions are situations that are placed in the system and/or conditions that sometimes can be made by individuals away from the actual operation. These could be policies and procedures that might seem okay initially, but later turn out to be contributing factors in an accident. Latent conditions can remain dormant for a long time, but when combined with other factors or a triggering mechanism can result in injury or loss. Eliminating latent conditions can have an enormous impact on preventing mishaps.

The key to a successful SMS is uncovering the latent conditions and addressing them before they result in an accident. This takes constant vigilance and attention to detail through the collection of safety reports and dealing with them on a daily basis. It requires a company culture that allows employees to raise the issues and management taking action. Unfortunately, most organizations don't foster this approach; we get comfortable and complacent with the way we operate and fail to ask "What if." We are then totally surprised when a serious accident does take place. As Yogi Berra once said, "If you keep doing what you're doing, you are going to keep getting what you got."

SAFETY CULTURE AND CORPORATE CULTURE ARE SYNONYMOUS

An active and positive Safety Culture can be considered vital to the success of a Safety Management System (SMS)óit gives the dynamic energy needed to ensure that the system will provide a continuous cycle of improvement as intended, which can be developed by leadership, commitment and setting a good example. With all the focus on SMS and Safety Culture, we may have lost sight that the elements of a good Safety Culture and Corporate Culture are one and the same. While organizations start to pursue SMS and creating a positive Safety Culture, they should step back and look at their corporate culture first.

Most senior managers probably have the opinion that Corporate Culture is too hard to measure and difficult to change. As a result, many choose not to invest in it despite all the evidence that, when skillfully managed, culture can be a powerful and enduring source of competitive advantage.

Recasting the culture of an organization can be done but it takes time. Despite what most believe, you can obtain both quantitative and qualitative data on your corporate culture through employee surveys and interviews. Many senior managers don't pursue this course of action, because they don't think there is a problem. Maybe if they adopted MBWA (Management by Walking Around) they would get another picture. Bill (W. Edwards) Deming, often credited with being the father of Total Quality Management (TQM), once wrote:

"If you wait for people to come to you, you'll only get small problems. You must go and find them. The big problems are where people don't realize they have one in the first place."

Tom Peters and Robert Waterman wrote that top managers in their "excellent" companies believed in management by walking about. In his second book, "A Passion for Excellence," Peters said that he saw "managing by wandering about" as the basis of leadership and excellence. Peters called MBWA the "technology of the obvious." As leaders and managers wander about, he said that at least three things should be going on:

They should be listening to what people are saying.
They should be using the opportunity to transmit the company's values face-to-face.
They should be prepared and able to give people on-the-spot help.

MBWA has been found to be particularly helpful when an organization is under exceptional stress; for instance, after a significant event or re-organization has been announced or when a takeover is about to take place. It is no good adopting MBWA for the first time on such occasions. MBWA has to become a regular practice before the stress arises.

Besides adopting MBWA, what else can be done to recast a company's culture? In the work described in Beyond Performance: How Great Organizations Build Ultimate Competitive Advantage by Scott Keller and Colin Price, there is a reliable formula leaders can use to create a distinctive performance culture in their organizations.

Establish a common understanding of culture and metrics for it. Ask the top team of any company what their highest priority goals are and you will likely hear answers like "increase market share by 10 percent" or "reduce costs by 15 percent." Ask the same question about their highest priority cultural goals and you're likely to hear a broad range of platitudes with few, if any, numbers. High-performing cultures are characterized by an ability to align (gain clarity of vision, strategy, and shared employee behaviors), execute (move in the agreed-upon direction with minimal friction), and renew (continuously improve at a pace that exceeds competitors) three factors also referred to as 'organizational health.' Companies that use this definition of culture to find the specifics that matter to them and the right tools to measure those specifics, find that culture is no longer something that is hard to measure and manage just as rigorously as business performance.

Focus on the few changes that matter most. Experts say that you can change no more than five aspects of an organization's culture in a 12- to 18-month period. Concentrating on a short list has the additional value of forcing everyone to focus on the changes most important to reaching the desired end state. Start with establishing the basics: agreeing on a shared direction, creating a baseline of openness and honesty, and developing a "can do" sense of personal accountability. Eighteen months after these cultural elements are sufficiently improved, you can move on to other areas such as creating a culture of innovation, people development, and customer focus. Attempting to tackle all of these elements at once will likely fragment the effort and weaken its impact.

Integrate culture change efforts with business process change and improvement initiatives. Few employees have too little to do. This means that culture change efforts run as stand-alone programs typically are last on the list and rarely succeed. Successful efforts are fully integrated into your operations and business processes and initiatives you're pursuingóeasy once you've defined the culture effectively. For example, peer coaching can help build a culture of developing people. Team meetings should include not just numbers, but also success stories of how individuals introduced a new efficiency or safety improvement.

Executed well, culture change programs using these three steps not only deliver better bottom-line results, but will also be the foundation for your SMS and will provide a more fulfilling environment for your employees. And for many executives, leading a successful culture-change program is the most rewarding work of their career, because doing so allows them to integrate the human factors that matter to everyone in any aviation organization.

SMS Partners is the combined expertise of several organizations to provide its customers with worldwide customized SMS solutions that will improve your safety record, prepare you for future regulatory requirements, and save you time and money. For more information, go to the SMS Partners' website.

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February 2012