Avoid the Whack-a-Mole Safety Management Program

by Al Matson, Minnesota Wing DOV, Professional Airline Pilot Instructor

Reactive Safety Management
What is the Whack-a-Mole Safety Management Program? It is the program of managing safety issues by pounding on the pilot when a safety issue pops up. Many of us have observed this system in practice. A pilot makes an error of some sort, either causing some amount of damage or nearly doing so, and then is punished (whacked) to keep him or her from making that mistake again. The theory here is that by whacking this pilot, the other pilots will see the potential for being whacked and therefore remain in their holes (not make errors). The problem is that, as can be observed in the game of Whack-a-Mole, the other moles just keep popping
out of the holes (pilot errors keep being made). This reactive style of management never addresses the reasons of why mistakes are made.
Reactive “Safety Managers” shown hard at work whacking problem pilots.
Manage the Problem, Not the Symptoms
To error is human, and while some pilots may think they are super-human, the fact remains that they will make mistakes. The job of a safety manager is to dig down and find out why a particular type of error keeps “popping up” and then find ways to eliminate the chance of the error occurring again, reduce its likelihood of reoccurrence, or at least reduce the impact of the error if it does surface again. It is a rare occurrence that a pilot willfully causes a problem, so remedial education is normally what is called for rather than punishment. Unless the pilot intended to create a problem, then “whacking” the pilot completely misses the mark because that is simply addressing the symptom and fails to address the real problems.
Identify All Contributing Issues
The Whack-a-Mole Safety Management program usually comes into play when you have management that is simply overloaded with other tasks, and doesn’t take the time to look for the chain of errors that lead to the undesired end-state (a bent tail ring for example). Simply punishing this pilot for the bent ring may seem like the most logical and expeditious way to deal with the problem, but that is just “Whack-a-Mole” in action. It won’t prevent anything, except perhaps further reporting of bent tail rings by that pilot (and all of his friends).
If the beleaguered safety manager were to look into how the tail ring came to be bent in the first place, he or she might identify common threads with other bent rings and perhaps identify a method for preventing further occurrences of this problem. Stopping the error chain at any point could
prevent a reoccurrence of the issue. This would be managing the problem, rather than the symptoms. This method is far more effective in preventing future problems, and that is the goal of a safety program.
Patience is a Virtue
While “Whack-a-Mole” may make some people feel like they “did something,” it is simply not effective in the long run. It fails to identify the real issues or to address them with solutions. While identifying and dealing with all of the issues surrounding an adverse event takes more time, and requires a good deal of patience, it is the best way to manage safety.