I saw this question on Quora.com. Good question! Complex answer 🙂 I started writing and it became pretty long so might as well make an article out of it 🙂 So why do Safety Management Systems fail? As usual there are a few ways to do something right and many more.. read more →

I am developing my ideas around complexity to involve it more in my Safety Management courses, I think it is a neglected topic. Understanding more about complexity and how our own mental simplifications and comparisions to complicated systems distorts our understanding of safety issues, explains a lot of the struggles around topics as Just Culture.. read more →

This post is meant as a resource page for a talk I gave at EBASCON 2017 in Munich. I will include links to sources and other posts which expand on the points made in my presentation. The links include articles on Skybrary.aero, an excellent resource curated by Eurocontrol about all kinds of Safety relevant information,.. read more →

Last year I spoke at the excellent safety event organised by Líder Aviação in Rio de Janeiro. My question was “Is SMS enough to make our organisations safer?” [Update, I gave a similar talk at EBASCON 2017 in Munich and I made a more elaborate resource page which details more explanation and links here] This question.. read more →

A Metronap Energy Pod in use at Google and others to help restore cognitive performance. Why is aviation not using this?

Seeing this sleep pod reminded me of the maintenance environment in aviation. Why is this not a thing in aviation yet? If there is any sector which needs this urgently it’s them! Of course this pod is only an example of a possible solution of the widespread problem that is fatigue. It personally rubs me.. read more →

The purpose of SMS: “Is SMS enough to make our organisations safer?” It was my great pleasure to speak at the excellent safety event organised by Líder Aviação in Copacabana, Rio de Janeiro on 20-10-2015. In this presentation I asked the question if we need to do more than just build the bureaucracy of the SMS.. read more →

In my post about soft skills I talked about the fact that the so-called soft skills are often more important than the technical skills of a Safety Manager. This is an area that is often missing completely from courses that pretend to improve SMS implementation which tend to focus on processes and procedures or “what” you need.. read more →

Sometimes organisations just added “implement SMS” to a long to-do list. Once the implementation is considered “done” they forget to look back and ask themselves “What is SMS supposed to do again?”. The basic assumption of an SMS is to move from ad-hoc, reactive management of safety to a more systematic and pro-active approach whereby.. read more →

Motivation and safety communication

Some basic (and up to date) knowledge about how motivation works is one of the crucial tools you need as a safety professional to get things done. When trying to influence people to act (change their behaviour, implement changes to the system or organisation, invest, etc.) you need to understand what motivates them. Using the.. read more →

What’s in a name? In aviation Safety Management Systems, the term safety manager is used to denominate the individual responsible for the development, operation and continuous improvement of the safety management system (SMS) deployed by an operator/service provider. He acts as a focal point for safety management issues in the organisation. In this post I’d.. read more →