The recent news of Boeing announcing its selection for the Chief Aerospace Safety Officer who has been an executive with over 36+ years with the company. He is not a safety professional nor did the announcement indicate any specialized training or experience in building a culture of safety or even rebuilding a Safety Management System (SMS). News reports state he joined Boeing in 1989 and was most recently vice president of Airplane Development at Boeing Commercial Airplanes, where he led design and certification work for the newest members of the 737 MAX family and the new 777-9.
One might ask “Why him”? What does he bring to the proverbial table?
This announcement made me think back to my 1st year as an industrial safety professional and a serious accident we had that year. My plant manager, who was a great man and leader – one every safety pro should have an opportunity to work for! During our investigation, we had three (3) government agencies “assisting us”. A lot of organizations would lawyer up, and don’t think company lawyers didn’t want that. But Claude was determined to make something good come from this bad accident. He felt there was a lot of luck involved that prevented this accident from being far worse and in order to LEARN from our mistakes we need OPEN and HONEST discussions about OUR FAILURES that led to this event.
I can remember this like it was yesterday… Claude sitting in our morning update meeting telling all the “corporate folks” who came to help that he was trying to build a culture of safety. Today, the phrases “Learning Organization” and “Just Culture” are what he was trying to build. And then he said it…
“Some companies build moats around their accident – we build bridges!”
We can’t fully LEARN from our incidents if we build moats! We need OPEN and HONEST (and frank) discussions about WHAT failed and WHY. Lawyers wanted to limit who was involved in the investigation and causal analysis; simply to limit “who knows what.”
So back to Boeing naming one of their 36-year employees, who is already a senior executive, as their new Chief Safety Officer. Companies make decisions like this when the truth about the internal problems is worse than what the public, regulators, and stockholders know. This means you build a moat around your problems to keep the truth at bay and protect the company more so than fix the problem.
