Safety Intelligence Is Business Intelligence

Traditionally, when we think about safety, we think about compliance—adhering to regulations or audit standards. Spending money on formal safety systems is often viewed as an unnecessary expense. After all, the thinking goes, if we haven’t had a serious incident or accident, why spend the money?

The Problem: Not All Costs Are Equal!

Expenses are costs incurred for short-term benefit; they do not guarantee future value or financial return. Investments, on the other hand, are costs incurred for long-term benefit. Investments increase the future value of a company; expenses do not.

Safety intelligence systems are investments. They facilitate compliance with regulations and audit standards, identify important drivers of risk and help codify knowledge and experience. A good safety intelligence system will ensure your organization never forgets a lesson learned, making your organization more effective and more efficient. Safety intelligence is business intelligence.

The Three Pillars: People, Processes and Technology

To implement a robust safety intelligence system, organizations must consider three key elements: people, processes and technology. The first, and most important, element is people. People are key because they are the ones on the front line. They are the first to identify problems. They are also the key to implementing solutions.

To get the most out of people, organizations must have a robust safety and reporting culture. This requires strong leadership. Strong leadership creates a climate of trust and accountability. General Colin Powell famously said, “Leadership is solving problems. The day soldiers stop bringing you their problems is the day you have stopped leading them.” Leadership cannot be outsourced; it must be developed within an organization.

Refining Processes and Identifying Causal Factors

The second element is processes, which are how people accomplish tasks. The processes do not have to be complicated, but they must be explicit. This reduces confusion and ambiguity. One of the most important processes is how to investigate safety events and concerns.

There are several data points in safety reports and investigations that organizations should track and trend. Each data point plays an important role in explaining an organization’s safety story. For example, mission impacts (e.g., delays and cancellations) and outcomes (e.g., injuries and damage) help explain how a safety hazard affects an organization. These results are easy to see, but they don’t easily explain what happened or why it happened.

To understand what happened, one must identify the deviations—human errors and/or malfunctions—that led to the bad outcome or mission impact. Flight Operations Quality Assurance (FOQA) and Flight Data Monitoring (FDM) are great tools that help identify these deviations.

However, to identify why a deviation happened, one must dig deeper to understand the underlying causal factors (hazards) that led to the deviation. Understanding the causal factors is key to solving safety problems, since these are the things that must be controlled.

Preventing High-Cost Events Through Causal Analysis

Ideally, we should track and trend all causal factors, not just the ones that led to serious incidents or accidents. Boeing’s Maintenance Error Decision Aid (MEDA), published in 2013, highlighted a U.S. Navy study that found low- and high-cost events had the same contributing factors! Thus, addressing the contributing factors of lower-cost events can prevent higher-cost events.

By analyzing the causal factors, we can understand the greatest drivers of risk within our operation. This knowledge allows us to more effectively and efficiently allocate scarce organizational resources to fix problems and optimize performance.

Transforming Data Into Actionable Insights

The third and final element is technology. Technology is key to transforming data into actionable insights, helping to simplify complexity by automating workflows.

In the end, safety is not about passing an audit and having a plaque on the wall; it is about protecting your most valuable resources—people. By considering people, processes and technology, you can implement a world-class safety intelligence system. This methodology is universal: it leads to safety and quality improvements.

The question is not: “How can my organization afford to implement a safety intelligence system?” Instead, the question is: “How can my organization afford not to implement one?” In the end, safety intelligence is business intelligence.