Customer management and safety

I like travelling KLM. The staff are really  great, and Schiphol is a very successful hub. 

My KLM flight last night got me to Glasgow an hour late, causing considerable inconvenience. That, however, is not the point of this post.

Schiphol was busy (Friday evening, no surprise) and freezing. There was a queue for the de-icing machine. 

The pilot told us that the delay for the de-icing was 22 minutes, and we had taken on extra fuel to go faster, and that ATC would allow us to take a shorter route.  From a customer experience point of view, misleading people and not keeping them informed is indeed a bad thing to do. It would have been so much better for him to have said "Very sorry. We will be an hour late. If you need to make a mobile phone call to tell people please do it now. I will tell you when to turn off your mobile phones". However, this post is about communications, and not the usual bleat about not being told what is going on and how inconvenient that is.

My anger at the inconvenience to my wife (and my consequent embarrassment) led me to consider this from a Crew Resource Management (CRM) point of view. 

The pilot:

• Did not challenge the information given by the ground crew (he must have  known it was wildly optimistic);
• Did not make realistic plans, and counted on 'something turning up';
• Did not keep people informed.

This is what you are trained to NOT do in CRM.  What makes him think he will be able to drop these bad habits when he is under stress? Why not practice the right approach all the time? Good for business, good for safety. Poor communications with passengers appears in far too many transport-related incident reports.  London Underground seem to have made a real commitment to improving passenger communications. The recent Eurotunnel breakdown problems are an example of poor communications.

If you want more background on why this matters, try googling KLM, crew resource management, Tenerife.

Behavioural economics applied to health and safety

The HSE has published a report authored by University of Liverpool and MBS on behavioural economics.

This is very welcome; the view of 'human error' in the safety community has been very limited, and this research may bring about a wider view of error. There is quite a sizeable collection of literature.

Surprising omissions include James Montier and Michael Mauboussin. Being academics, they do not seem to have a good handle on the range of decisions that affect safety (workplace = overalls + people not as bright as us), and the recommendations are the inevitable ones for more research rather than application.

Despite these limitations, it is an extremely welcome publication.

Learning from weak signals

Michael Krigsman's excellent blog has a post about learning from the weak signals of failure. Well worth a read, and illustrates the synergy between good management from a commercial point of view and from a safety point of view. Being able to give senior managers bad news is key to both.

He also has a link to a classic Dilbert cartoon.

Ergonomics and the precautionary principle

From Euractive via CCNet

A David Zaruk is pointing to the cost of the precautionary principle e.g. in REACH and environmental matters. "Before, scientists could develop an innovation and market it, after it was up to others to prove and test that it is dangerous. Now, you need to prove something is safe before it can be marketed."

"Precaution was created as a tool for policy, by those who think science has gone too far," Zaruk argued.

"Precautionary logic entails that not being right is not the same as being wrong. In other words, if you use the precautionary principle, you are never wrong," he continued, stressing that "for policymakers, it is much more attractive to never be wrong than to take the risk and be right."

"We need a little bit of political courage. Precaution is a policy tool for cowards, because if you are never wrong, you don't have to take risks or be responsible for any indirect negative consequences." But while it is easy to hide behind precaution when making difficult decisions, "you affect people when you stop research" by denying them potential future benefits of nanotech research, for example, he said.

Given the uncertainties around human variability and adaptability, it is easy for ergonomics to fall into an illusory 'better safe than sorry' approach e.g. pursuing safety control at the expense of using people to make safety. This is likely to become more of a concern unless the anti-science anti-risk culture changes.