LEADERSHIP

The task of changing our industries safety culture is, in my opinion, one of the most important components to improving our safety record! And of course, this means that it will be difficult to accomplish. When we discuss “safety culture”, I often feel as though we are attempting to answer a grey question with a black and white answer. Unfortunately, I fear that such an approach is doomed to failure. We have years of experience with this approach…

I believe that leadership is the key to any culture, and safety culture is no different. Unfortunately, our society is rife with managers…but sorely lacking in leaders. Leadership and management often have opposing views about many issues, not just safety; because leadership is about people, while management is about money. And today, I believe that the vast majority of decisions are made from a management point of view.

Managers are often too concerned with short-term profitability, and the bottom line is often their sole metric. Leaders know that the cost of safety will be amortized over many years…and virtually no cost will outweigh the consequences (neither human nor economic) associated with an accident.

So perhaps safety is not tangible enough…it is certainly difficult to quantify. How do you measure the cost savings from an incident, or accident averted? Managers cannot assess a cost to something that did not occur. Even with that said, I DO NOT believe that managers intend to cast a blind eye towards safety. Their black and white answers are simply incongruent to the question. But leaders, leaders are much more adept in this world of grey. They lead using reasonableness and commonsense, compassion and mercy. The do not need a profit and loss statement, or a balance sheet to tell them the importance of safety, they see the value every day in the people who depend upon them to lead. True leaders know that the cost of an incident or accident is far greater than replacement cost of an aircraft. Leaders value people…not because they are a resource within their company…but simply because they are human beings.

Daniel Kahneman won the Nobel Prize in economics in 2002 for his studies of human behavior. He points out that as humans, we are often blind to the obvious, and blind to our blindness. A good example in his book “Thinking, Fast and Slow” describes an experiment regarding priming…specifically a priming phenomenon known as the ideomotor effect (the influencing of action by an idea). One group of students were asked to form sentences with words which we would normally associate with old age such as: Florida, Retirement, Wrinkle, Cadillac, and Medicare. Another group was asked to form sentences with words associated with youth such as: California, Surfing, Bikini, Ferrari, and Smartphone. He discovered that the students who worked with the “old age” words walked slower as they departed the experiment, than those who worked with the “youthful” words. Merely forming sentences with words which subconsciously “primed” them affected these persons physical behavior.

Another great example of the ideomotor effect was an experiment conducted in which a woman walks into a room with persons taking an exam. The first room she enters (with students taking an exam) was “money-primed”. There were images or items placed around the room with financial meaning, like monopoly money stacked on a desk, the financial page of the Wall Street Journal opened on a table, a photograph of different world currency on the wall…all relatively subtle and seemingly benign to an observer. The second room she enters (again with students taking an exam) was not primed in any way. The walls were beige and unadorned…nothing designed to prime the students. When the lady walked into each room she would purposely stumble and fall, causing the contents of her purse to spill out onto the floor. The students in the money-primed room were less apt to help her recover her belongings than the students in the unprimed room. Priming changed their physical action/response. And certainly none of the students in the money primed room were aware that their behavior was impacted by the simple suggestion of money.

You may be asking yourself, so what does this have to do with “Safety Culture”? I believe there is a direct corollary between the behavior of the test subjects in these experiments and ordinary flight crewmembers. We are all human, and thus subject to the same foibles. Pilots and mechanics…in fact most every person involved in flight operations today are money-primed. As much as possible we need to remove flight personnel from information or images which link their performance to money. Leaders need to ensure that the flight crewmembers consistently receive the message that safety is paramount. Words such as: revenue, direct operating cost, overtime, bottom line, cost, loss, etc. should be forbidden around the crew. Instead we should promote words / messages such as: please error on the side of safety, safe is better than sorry, tomorrow is another day, safety is NO accident, nothing is worth an accident, etc. Let’s prime with messages which encourage safety! And the good news for managers is that this effort has a very small cost. 

We must understand human behavior and use this newfound knowledge for good purpose. Simply said, priming is real…let’s eliminate damaging messages and incorporate positive messages to improve our safety culture.

Bruce A. WEBB

Director of Aviation Education