By: LCDR Greg Anderson, USN
Standardization Board Chairman for VR-1, the Navy’s Special Air Mission squadron.
From where I sit as a U.S. Navy aviator, an organization’s culture is the crux of any implementation challenge. When involved and dedicated leaders learn to use their understanding of that culture they can orchestrate the kind of change that sticks.
If the seams of an organization, bound together by years of structure and policy, become strained and gapped a well-defined culture can reinforce the integrity of those strained seams and prevent calamity. But the same culture can create a significant barrier to change – any kind of change. The navy faced this barrier when we transitioned from our traditional approach to safety to a new (for us) Operational Risk Management (ORM) system.
You won’t find a culture that is more entrenched than the military culture. The Navy’s safety culture was forged on the anvil of almost a century of experience. In 1997, when we transitioned to ORM, we had a GOOD safety program. It incorporated the essentials: hazard identification, risk assessment and control.
We needed a GREAT program. We needed a safety program that cultivates and nurtures a culture of commitment that guarantees the operators, maintainers and administrators value the safety tenets and employ them everyday... on every task. You might think that moving the Navy from a good program to a great program would be easy. It wasn’t. The fact that we already had a good safety program made change harder.
You can buy books and articles on strategic change management and you can spend hours reading them. Most authors agree that change is most likely to fail during the implementation phase. Skepticism, failure to buy-in, inadequate training and (this is interesting) lofty expectations all stand in the way. The road from policy deployment to cultural acceptance is uphill. However, the challenge is by no means insurmountable. Even large, complicated organizations can respond to a good plan supported by dedicated leadership. Exhibit A: the U.S. Navy.
In 1997, fraught with cultural road blocks to operational hazard identification and risk management, the Navy adopted the Department of the Army’s successful ORM process. Leaders, still gun shy from the early ‘90s foray into Total Quality Leadership were reticent to embrace the new “mumbo-jumbo”. However, with a precipitous trend in accidents propelling the need to transform the Navy’s methodology, and a well-defined training strategy targeting key leadership first, critical top level buy-in was achieved and ORM principles widely adopted.
This was a monumental step that shifted our paradigm from one where risk management decisions were made in isolation, to an architecture where a process could be universally applied at all levels to improve decision making – on and off duty.
As I reflect on the past 12 years of ORM, indicators of successful implementation are omnipresent. There is a manifestation of its fundamentals in our hardware operating culture – the “how we do things around here” mentality. What was viewed with skepticism is now sustained by a culture of open communication and dedicated application of ORM fundamentals. We begin each mission or action with a quick, comprehensive brief and end with a “hot wash” of the execution designed to grab the takeaways/lessons learned.
We don’t just use ORM in tactical situations. I use the ORM process to safely transport our senior principals to places like Chicago-Midway on a G-550 in January, in ugly weather with a new co-pilot at the end of a long day. I apply ORM with other stakeholders when revising a standardization policy on how we operate our G-IIIs. It has kept me safe across a variety of tasking, missions and operating environments.
With the nascent rise of SMS driving the development of safety programs aimed at universal compliance it is apparent that the aviation industry is about to undertake a change management project of epic proportions. The solutions will come in all shapes and sizes. A scalable model that captures the best practices of safety policy and procedure is a good starting point, but the ultimate goal is adjusting and improving the organization’s collective attitude and beliefs. Caught in the middle, operators, maintainers and administrators will wonder what the end-state is supposed look like. They need clarity and guidance. And the basic culture must be protected.
The Navy’s commitment to a great safety program came from the top-down and we constantly improve it. SMS will work. Don’t be afraid to change. But pay attention to the way you manage your implementation. And learn to use your culture to make you even safer.
