Safety, Human Performance, System: From Theory to Practice

On 24-26 September, EUROCONTROL/NAV-Portugal hosted a conference in Lisbon entitled Safety, Human Performance, System: From Theory to Practice. Over 150 people in aviation and other industries participated, including safety specialists, human factors specialists, engineers, managers, and regulators.

The conference (following a conference last year on safety and human performance, where a White Paper on SafetyI and Safety-II was introduced), had the aim to help progress the implementation of progressive thinking. Below is an outline of the main sessions of the event. In the following few blogs, I will discuss develop some of my thoughts during the conference. The presentations can be downloaded here.

Session 1:

Prof. Richard Cook (School of Technology and Health at Royal Institute of Technology,  Stockholm, Sweden) – Only bad choices

Sebastian Däunert (DFS, Germany) – Limits of safety

Session 2: Prof. David Slater (Cambrensis, UK) – Simple but complex (Clayton Tunnel – a test case)

Session 3: Prof. Chris Johnson – (Glasgow University, UK) – Software tools to increase the competence, consistency and creativity of ATM incident investigators

Session 4: Jean Marc Flon (DSNA, France) – Starting to move from Safety-I to Safety-II at CDG

Session 5:

Steven Shorrock – (EUROCONTROL, France) – Systems Thinking for Safety: Ten Principles (A White Paper) (See here for the White Paper)

Lee Boulton & Craig Foster (NATS, UK) – The (Very) Temporary Operating Instruction.

Session 6: Thomas Jaekel (DFS, Germany) – ATM Day to Day operations – work as done.

Session 7: Prof. Erik Hollnagel (University of Southern Denmark and Centre for Quality Improvement, Region of Southern Denmark) – Safety-II in practice – Realigning work-as-imagined with work-as-done

Session 8: Paula Santos (NAV Portugal) – Modelling day to day ATM

Session 9:

Radu Cioponea (EUROCONTROL) and Christoph Peters (DFS) – Weak Signals

Prof. David Woods (Ohio State University) – The mystery of sustained adaptability.

Session 11: Panel and interactive session with Prof. Johnson, Prof. Woods Prof. Hollnagel, Prof. Cook and Prof. Slater, Dr. Steven Shorrock. Moderated session by SHP SG Co-chairs Joerg Leonhardt and Tony Licu.