Read on Twitter
TFW when you watch Top Gun for the 1st time in 20 years or so and you realise it’s all about differing views of safety, goal conflicts & trade-offs, work-as-imagined vs work-as-done, blame & punish vs learn & improve, & what it takes to actually get the job done!
(Thread 1/?)
(Thread 1/?)
To begin, what are we trying to keep safe anyway? Ourselves? Our colleagues? The country? Or just an expensive plane? 2/
And how do we “achieve safe” anyway? Just by following the rules and not making mistakes? Management have decided on the “one right way” to do something, and you just need to comply with it…3/
…and if something bad happens, then obviously you’ve done something stupid, dangerous or foolish. 4/
But how does the “protocol” compare to the reality of work at the sharp end? Policies and procedures are always underspecified, & production pressure & time constraints means there’s always a gap between WAI & WAD. 5/
And there will always be complex social and...er…”organisational” factors influencing the system… 6/
…and very often the organisation is trying to protect itself, rather than the people working in it. 7/
So perhaps instead, safety is created by experts working at the margins, knowing when it’s ok to break the rules, in order to get the job done. 8/
Finding counter-intuitive solutions that go against protocol, yet achieve the production goals while keeping the system safe. Though there’s no guarantee the novel approach, though successful, will go down well with senior management. 9/
But sadly no matter how safe the system is, nor the level of individual expertise, things will still go wrong occasionally. 10/
And chances are, in a long and successful career, you’ll see a lot of things go wrong. 11/
And even if we weren’t “stupid, dangerous, or foolish”…12/
…we will still have a tendency to blame ourselves. 13/
And because we are sense making creatures, there will be epistemological discussions around what *actually* happened… 14/
…and even if, through the blurry lens of hindsight, we find out the “facts” of what happened… 15/
…they often won’t deal with the existential suffering and questions we have… 16/
…and getting straight back into the saddle is easier than it sounds. 17/
Support from friends and colleagues is important, but there are some not so great ways to do it… 18/
…and also much better ways to do it. 19/
And it’s important to remember that blame and punishment will rarely fix things, especially if we are doing it to ourselves. It’s much more useful to try to learn and improve from what happened. 20/
So I think a good, safe, & resilient system is one where we can acknowledge rules might need to be broken, that bad things can happen even if we do follow them, & while those bad things truly do suck, we can support people through them, & get them back in the air. 21/
22/
And finally, I’m still not sure if this scene is some discussion of the application of safety science to military aviation, or a description of how the evening is going to pan out…
23/23
23/23
