“If I get hit by a bus tomorrow…”
It’s a phrase that I use a lot. If you have interacted with me for any length of time, you probably have heard me say it right before I explain or demonstrate something pretty important. Not to get too deep, but it comes from having to do things at an early age, when there was no guarantee of someone else doing it for you. Period. So as a parent, I taught my 3 sons to do their own laundry and cook eggs before they were 8 years old, because if I got hit by a bus tomorrow, they would have at least those skills to be clean and stay alive. Morbid? A little bit. Practical? Most definitely.
Every organization, be it family or work related, is going to have a knowledge base. A lot of it is tribal knowledge, learned and passed down from the founding fathers and mothers through on the job training, exposure and repetition. Writing things down on how to do it isn’t high on the priority list because there is a job to do and that’s it. If something changes, we will figure it out and adapt on the fly. Been here, done that.
It's all well and good until someone isn’t there anymore. A key player left the game and everyone else is standing around looking at one another for leadership, guidance, skill, or let’s be real, a password.
Organizations that are required to have regulated manuals are a little bit ahead of the written down knowledge game, but I’m pretty sure not everything is written down on the day to day processes or guidance on the “what ifs” that will inevitably spring up.
That is where the beauty of a Safety Management System comes in…over time, it is going to capture the nuances of an organization. The holes in the documentation, knowledge base, and communication within an organization will be evident and putting the fixes in place will just make the organization stronger.
How will a Safety Management System actually do that? By requiring a few key elements in the form of…
Business continuity - What are the processes in place in case something goes wrong? The Emergency Response Plan (14 CFR 5.27) is one of those areas that will make a company think about how it will go from one state to another, and back again. What if a key player is involved? Who will be responsible and are they aware or knowledgeable about that role?
Change Management - What are the risks associated with major change triggers listed in 14 CFR 5.51? For example: Is adding a new airplane to the fleet a good idea at this time? Do we have the equipment in the Maintenance and Line departments? Do we have the personnel to handle that addition, not only pilots, but maintenance, dispatch and accounting departments as well? Do we have a simple list of who does what to make this happen without too many hiccups?
Documentation - 14 CFR 5.97 covers document retention. Within those documents, however detailed they are, there should emerge a paper trail that builds the story of a company…the decisions made along the way, which not only affect the safety of the company, but also reflect business practices and company culture.
Think of it like this: the SMS is a Library and the Safety Manager is the Librarian. It is a place to reference, learn from, and grow from. In fact, one of the first things I counsel new Safety Managers on is to do a deep dive into the SMS documents to learn from the past.
Not every company is going to turn around and write every single thing down even with the FAA’s Part 5 SMS ruling, but at the very least, if the company gets hit by a bus tomorrow (or however you want to define it), over time there will be something to reference to help in whatever recovery method is needed.
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