Making Sense of Aviation Safety
Our Aims
Global Aim
The standing aim of any BALPA Safety Conference is to facilitate connections and conversations between the many players in safety within the UK airline industry and beyond. Be that union officials, regulators, and safety professionals of all types.
Specific Conference Aim
Our specific aim with this conference is to show that the progression beyond compliance and process safety is grounded in scientific theory. Our speakers will highlight the unique nature of complex adaptive systems and the need to purposefully manage for this paradigm shift in our understanding of the lack of cause and effect within our systems.
Moving Forward
We have, as an industry, an already incredible safety record and this conference does nothing to undermine that achievement. We are not proposing that these ideas replace the work done to date, but rather complement our current approach and enable the continuing evolution of our safety systems.
Overview, Agenda, and Line Up
Overview
This conference focuses on the opportunities and responsibilities resulting from a better awareness of the fundamental nature of our aviation systems. As a progression from our initial conference this event provides the platform to gain some of the foundational knowledge of complexity that will create the paradigm shift in understanding needed to take advantage of the modern safety concepts that are currently being progressed, both within aviation and other complex industries.
Beyond these insights into complex adaptive systems we will share some of the practical work being done through partnership between BALPA Flight Safety, Cranfield University, and Cognitive Edge. This jointly run Risk Culture study uses some of the latest technology designed to derive sense-making from within our sociotechnical systems and significantly improve our system management.
Agenda - Start Time 12:00 UTC (13:00 BST)
BALPA Flight Safety
Welcome and Introduction
Reflection: January safety conference
Gary Wong
Understanding of Complexity
Making sense of safety: Cynefin Framework
Safety Spear roles
3 Basic systems -> 5 domains
Decision-making methods
Constraints - fixed, governing, enabling
Sonja Blignaut
The complexities of Responsible Leadership
Gary Wong
Making sense of safety: Operational level
Traditional Survey v SenseMaker
Big, Thick, Rich data
SenseMaker process
Self-interpretation with Signifiers
Cengiz Turkoglu
Risk Culture project
3rd study since 2016
Walkthrough online SenseMaker collector
Safety Space
Org Risk Behaviour Framework
Heuristics
Bursary prize
Q&As with Panellists - Including SenseMaker Dashboard
Display real-time data
Heat maps
Workbench
Next steps
Close
The Line Up
BALPA is very grateful to all the panellists who have volunteered to share their wealth of knowledge and experience with us. Our panel have all agreed to help forward our understanding of the world by giving us a solid foundation of understanding that we will hope give you the impetus and confidence to explore and evolve further your organisations safety systems.
Gary Wong
Gary has over 45 years of experience starting with his career in an electrical utility where he worked in engineering, line operations, business consulting and training roles. He later joined Ernst & Young Consulting (now Capgemini Consulting) as a Senior Manager in Strategy & Transformation.
He has operated his own independent consulting practice over the past 15 years focusing on complexity thinking and safety. He co-developed a complexity-based approach to shape safety culture and co-authored the chapter entitled “A Cynefin Approach to Leading Safety in Organizations“ in the Cynefin Book released in 2020.
Gary has an engineering degree from the University of British Columbia and a MBA from Simon Fraser U. He also has held roles as a certified FranklinCovey 7 Habits facilitator and an Edward de Bono Six Thinking Hats and Lateral Thinking instructor. He resides in Vancouver, Canada.
Cengiz Turkoglu
Cengiz is a Lecturer and Researcher at the Cranfield Safety & Investigation Centre and also the Quality Manager for the SPO Authorisation and the Part M Approval of the Cranfield’s National Flying Laboratory Centre. He has been a member of the UK Flight Safety Committee since 2010 and served as the Vice-Chairman since 2015. He has also been representing the International Federation of Airworthiness in EASA Collaborative Analysis Groups for Human Factors and Commercial Air Transport since 2016. He has been exploring the topic of ‘Risk Culture in Commercial Air Transport’ as part of his PhD study for the last 5 years.
Sonja Blignaut
Sonja is the founder of More Beyond. She has been working in the fields of narrative and complexity since 2002. Before founding More Beyond, she worked as a consultant for PWC and IBM. She left the formal consulting world in 2004 to focus on doing more of what she loved. Since then, she has consulted locally and internationally with clients that include the Sasol Group, Sasol Inzalo Foundation, Barclays, MMI, Anglo American, Harmony Gold, Nedbank, Standard Bank, Liberty, FNB, Gautrain Management Agency, PWC, IBM North America, DSTV, Eskom, SANParks, the Water Research Commission and many others.
Sonja trains locally and internationally in complexity and related topics at various academic institutions including the University of Pretoria and GIBS Business School.
Sonja has been the sole South African partner for Prof Dave Snowden’s company Cognitive Edge, the creator of Sensemaker® since 2007. In addition, she is a certified Scrum Master (Agile project manager) and is also qualified in various individual and team coaching modalities including Narrative coaching, Strengths Coaching and Organisation Systems Relationship Coaching.