Written by Sarah Booth, Managing Principal Consultant, Fatigue Risk Management, at Baines Simmons
A Collaborative Approach to Safety Management
SAFE 360º is a collaborative conference, held under Chatham house rules, designed for organisations from across the aviation sector in Europe to discuss challenges related to safety management, find areas for improvement, and to challenge ourselves as an industry to identify where improvements can be made.
Reflections and Key Takeaways
My main takeaways from this conference were a list of challenging questions – questions to ask of ourselves, of the support that we as Baines Simmons provide to organisations, and for organisations to ask of themselves. In the interests of continuous improvement, we need to keep challenging ourselves, asking the questions even if we may not always like the answers.
Questions to Drive Continuous Improvement
So, in the interest of improving the management of safety across the industry, I’ll list some of the key thought-provoking questions here:
- Is our Safety Management System (SMS) seeking comfort? Or are we asking ourselves the difficult questions, and looking under the rocks for the difficult to solve latent issues?
- Are we so busy with the day-to-day process of managing safety that we are forgetting the actual goal of improving safety at the front line?
- Do we lose the ‘so what?’ of safety? Are we doing our audits, using our matrices, and completing risk registers just to complete the audit, show that we have used the matrix, and have a compliant risk register? Or does this activity change things for the frontline?
- When was the last time that our Management System ‘paperwork’ changed something on the front line?
- Do we really demonstrate ownership of risk in the correct areas? Or are we delegating to the Safety Manager and their team?
- Are we drowning in a sea of safety data that we don’t know what to do with? Or is it giving us actionable intelligence that we can use?
Powerful Statements that Deserve Reflection
And finally, some statements made by the speakers that I thought were really powerful, and require pause for thought:
- We need to recognise that our systems, processes and methods are fallible
- Compliance doesn’t protect you from human fallibility, but it may hide it
- Our people are often coping, not thriving. And we keep making things more complex, which is only going to make it harder
Huge thanks to the speakers at the conference, and for EASA’s organisation. All credit for these questions goes to them, but I think we can all take something from this to think about.
Baines Simmons Performance Assessment and SMAART MAP
At Baines Simmons, we believe that truly effective safety management requires a deep understanding of how your system actually works. That’s where our SMARRT MAP framework comes in. It enables organisations to ask the difficult, often uncomfortable questions that reveal the true performance of their Safety Management System (SMS).
Rather than simply assessing whether the required elements are present, SMARRT MAP encourages a more holistic and dynamic evaluation. It helps you explore how well your system is functioning, how it’s enabling frontline safety improvements, and whether it’s truly supporting ownership of risk in the right places.
In our Performance Assessments, we use SMARRT MAP to guide organisations through this process, helping them move from a compliance mindset to one of continuous improvement and operational resilience. It’s a powerful tool to support the kind of reflective, challenging conversations that SAFE 360º is all about.
If this approach sounds helpful and you’d like to explore how a Performance Assessment could benefit your organisation, please don’t hesitate to get in touch with us.