Ten difficult questions for rail industry leaders about their corporate risk awareness and management assurance.
1: Do you really understand how safety is actually achieved by your organisation, day in, day out, despite constantly varying conditions… or are you only focused on what can go wrong?
2: Do you cultivate and reward the characteristic of chronic unease in the board room… or are you a little too ready to receive positive news and plug it into a comfortable model of how well your organisation is managing safety?
3: Do you have the ‘requisite imagination’ to assess safety threats beyond your experience… or are you bound by the limits of your experience and data?
4: Do you actively seek measures of how well your safety systems are working in the real world… or do you continue to rely on lagging data which tells you everything about what has gone wrong, but very little about why?
5: Are you able to select and analyse the information you need to properly understand your safety performance… or are you drowning in a sea of data?
6. Do you really understand why your people deviate from laid-down processes… or are you simply cataloguing non-compliances with bad process?
7: Do you have an open, honest and just culture that encourages the flow of information up, down and across your organisation?… or is it just good news that flows freely?
8: Are your safety processes properly understood and embedded with those who must make them work… or are ‘things done differently away from head office’?
9: How well does your organisation learn from previous experience, and then use it to improve its safety arrangements… or are you slow to learn and reluctant to change?
10: Do you spend time out and about, watching how things are done and listening to your people… or are you trapped in a senior management ‘echo’ chamber?
Regardless of how you and your senior colleagues would answer the above questions, there’s always more that can be done to improve an organisation’s awareness of safety risk and management assurance. Certainly, this will require formal process, and leaders have a responsibility to see that these are established.
However, every bit as important is organisational culture - a culture built on imagination, openness, honesty and fairness which enables the free flow of information and ideas that is needed to understand and respond appropriately to threats to the safety of its people and customers.
It is my view, formed during 17 years of experience at RAIB, that this is the area in which industry leaders can make the biggest difference to railway safety.
