A Call to Action: Improving Safety by Learning From All Operations
The time has come for aviation to complement the traditional approaches to learning for safety and recognise the issues that arise from increasingly complex systems and environments. We call for a fundamental shift to learn from all operations and events — not just from those that are unwanted. In an increasingly interconnected and complex aviation system, it is imperative to learn not only from things that rarely go wrong but also from things that go right. Data collection needs to expand from a focus on hazardous events to analysis of routine operational data. While it will continue to be essential to identify hazards and manage risks, organisations should also analyse data that lead to new insights from everyday work across all types of outcomes — insights that enable learning that is more frequent, sensitive and timely. Learning from everyday operational data and events can enhance safety management that is often based on a small subset of performance information, which may introduce avoidable but unrecognised consequences into the aviation system.
This paper is a call to action to managers and executives who are accountable for safety in their organisations. We describe a safety mindset that expands our understanding of what constitutes a safety-relevant event and improves our ability to learn from everyday work. We propose a rethinking of long-held approaches to safety that endeavour to transform organisations focused on knowing about safety into organisations focused on learning about safety (e.g., Vesel, 2020). We encourage accountable safety professionals to integrate the Learning From All Operations into existing safety programs. To assist in that effort, we offer practical suggestions, specific examples and lessons learned from others who have begun their own pursuit of learning from all operations...
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