When a business or a team fails, particularly in an emergency situation, the same root causes are always present : rigid leadership, internal conflicts, ineffective communication, lack of information sharing, to name but the most common.
And even in non-crisis or emergency situations, the same causes end up causing the same effects. It’s just a little gentler and takes longer.
Of course, businesses are looking for a solution, sometimes and often through technology, but you can’t use technology to solve problems that are first and foremost human (We should not expect an application to work in environments for which its assumptions are not valid)
On the other hand, some companies have found the solution and are training their employees, and above all their executives. This is an excellent example of a practice that is close to my heart: taking a solution from one industry and applying it to others. Sometimes you find the martingale, sometimes just ideas, but it forces you to reconsider your problems with fresh eyes.
This solution has a name: CRM.
You’re going to tell me that all businesses are equipped and trained to do CRM (Customer Relationship Management), and that not only is it nothing new, but it doesn’t solve any of the problems in question. It doesn’t.
But that’s just an acronym error: I’m talking about Crew Resource Management.
And since work organization and aviation are both my professional and non-professional passions, I’m delighted to delve into the subject here.
The origins of Crew Resource Management
Crew Resource Management has its origins in aviation.
It was born in the 1970s, after several air accidents which were not due to technical failures, but to human errors, often linked to problems of communication, decision-making or crew conflict management.
For many, the “founding act” was United Airlines flight 173 (1978), where, to put it simply, one pilot concentrated on a landing gear anomaly, ignoring his co-pilot’s warnings that they were running out of fuel. In the end, the plane crashed 10 km from the runway when it could have attempted to land.
This had two consequences.
The first was that the NTSB (National Transportation Safety Board) investigator in charge of the inquiry made the connection with several other accidents with similar causes, namely not a technical problem but a problem of organization and distribution of work in the cockpit.
Secondly, the same NTSB issued a recommendation that airlines ensure their crews are trained in the principles of cockpit resource management, with particular emphasis on the merits of participative management for captains and assertiveness training for other crew members.
The difference between the airline industry and a normal business is that when a pattern is identified that leads to a final outcome, new rules are imposed on the entire sector to ensure that it never happens again.
This is how CRM has become the norm, so that problems which are primarily human, cognitive and collaborative do not cause drama in the absence of any technical problem, or, in a situation which starts with a technical problem, prevent the human component from aggravating an initially innocuous situation.
Any resemblance to real-life business situations and characters is purely coincidental. Or not.
The objectives of Crew Resource Management
On the basis of the above, the objectives of CRM are :
Improve communication: ensure that each team member can express himself/herself clearly, and that there is active listening, even in stressful environments.
Optimize decision-making: encourage collective decisions using available information and the skills of each team member.
Manage resources: maximize the use of human, technical and information resources to meet operational needs.
Reinforce vigilance and anticipation: help teams identify and solve problems before they become critical.
Reduce human error: understand cognitive and behavioral biases to minimize their impact.
You don’t have to be a genius to understand how many of the same problems we face in the workplace are commonplace.
The fundamentals of Crew Resource Management
Here we come back to familiar management and leadership principles.
Shared leadership: the captain is in charge, but each member must be able to intervene in the event of a problem.
Assertiveness and mutual respect: encourage the expression of differing opinions in a constructive and respectful manner.
Conflict management: resolve tensions quickly to maintain a positive work dynamic.
Situational awareness: understanding the current state of operations and anticipating next steps.
Constant revision: continuous learning from mistakes and feedback.
The advantage of CRM, in my opinion, compared to what I’ve seen in terms of management training, is that it imposes highly codified practices, whereas in organizations, we tend to play on behavior, hoping that people will actually implement what we’ve taught them.
What’s more, it doesn’t require people to have worked together for a long time in order to get to know and understand each other: everyone follows the same model, whether they’re working with people for the first or the thousandth time.
CRM is a bit like the “cockpit highway code”: there’s a way of doing things, it’s binding on everyone, and anyone who disregards it can be singled out for criticism, not to say worse.
Let’s take a look at the impact of CRM, point by point.
Crew resource management and ineffective communication
It’s not uncommon for poorly transmitted, incomplete or ambiguous messages to lead to costly errors, delays or internal conflicts. I wrote about this here recently (No one should be promoted to manager if they don’t know how to use ChatGPT).
For example, you give vague instructions thinking that the other person has understood, you don’t check what the other person has understood, and in the end you get something that doesn’t correspond to the request, and you have to recommend it.
If it’s a powerpoint presentation, it’s a shame; if it’s an ERP project framework, it’s dramatic and costly.
CRM teaches the importance of clear, structured communication, using protocols such as closed-loop feedback (paraphrasing and validating the instructions received). The manager, for example, asks each member to repeat their understanding of requests and priorities to validate mutual understanding and alignment.
Crew resource management and silo decision-making
Once again, we’re dealing with a familiar situation. Decisions taken by an individual or a department without consulting other stakeholders can ignore essential data or constraints, leading to major errors and side-effects.
For example, a department decides to invest in a software tool without consulting the technical teams. The tool turns out to be incompatible with existing systems, sometimes leading to integration costs and additional delays, or even to the project being scrapped.
CRM, on the other hand, promotes a collective decision-making approach, integrating contributions from all relevant members. Before choosing the tool, a cross-functional meeting could be held to assess the technical, operational and financial impacts.
Crew Resource Management and conflict management
How many times have misunderstandings, enmities and latent conflicts between colleagues ruined the functioning of a team? On a day-to-day basis, it’s detrimental; on a major project, it’s extremely serious; on a management committee, it can be fatal.
For example, in a business, the team is divided over the best strategy for a customer. The conflict intensifies, and the customer perceives a lack of cohesion, becomes frightened and stops negotiations or tries to break an existing contract.
CRM trains teams to manage conflict constructively, using techniques such as assertiveness and mutual respect. Here, a manager could intervene to property a framework for discussion and guide the parties towards a common solution.
Crew resource management and situational awareness
This is where employees fail to perceive or understand priorities, risks or opportunities, leading to inappropriate decisions or even internal conflict.
In the airline industry, this is the case of Air France flight 447 between Rio and Paris, where the crew failed to identify a stall situation.
In business, it could be a logistics team failing to detect a critical stock shortage in time, resulting in supply disruptions for customers and the financial losses that go with them. Or simply a project manager who fails to detect early on, in the excitement of the project launch, an over-consumption of resources that will be realized over time to be fatal in terms of profitability.
CRM teaches the notion of situational awareness: monitoring weak signals, sharing relevant information in real time and anticipating developments. A shared dashboard and regular meetings could be introduced to monitor critical indicators.
This is one of the first things I personally “stole” from CRM (Improving a team’ s work: a story of continuous improvement) to fuel a continuous improvement approach (participative and collaborative, of course).
Crew Resource Management, stress, work overload and cognitive overload
High stress, work overload, information overload and cognitive overload can impair performance, reduce perspective-taking and lead to errors , not to mention the QWL dimension.
We can’t say we’ve been stingy with warnings on the subject (Digital Infobesity: When Collaboration Tools Degrade Productivity, QWL and Amplify Mental Workload or In the future of work the mental load is the new workload).
For example, during a critical period of business mergers, managers are overwhelmed by administrative tasks. In so doing, they neglect not only the day-to-day business, which is slowly but surely starting to deteriorate, with declining operational and financial performance and dissatisfied customers, but also the human aspects, leading to a loss of employee motivation.
CRM focuses on stress management and prioritizing tasks as a team. In this case, delegating certain responsibilities and organizing regular meetings to share workloads helps to manage the situation more effectively.
Crew Resource Management and leadership
Here we talk about ” bossy bosses ” and other open-space tyrants. An authoritarian management style can discourage employees from reporting problems, expressing innovative ideas and is simply a source of fear, stress and ultimately disengagement.
In the airline industry, you’ll no doubt have a “recent” example in mind with the crash of flight Asiana 214 in 2013 during its landing in San Francisco. Among the many causes (all human) was a culturally-based leadership problem. In Asian cultures, authority is not questioned, which meant that the co-pilot who should have taken charge when he realized the plane was going to miss the runway didn’t dare to overrule his superior or take the controls himself.
“This overabundance of skills and hierarchical levels – a very sensitive aspect in Korean culture – seems to have played a decisive role in the accident. One of the pilots interviewed by the American investigators confessed to having realized even before the crash that the landing procedure was being carried out at too low a speed. But this pilot felt that he did not have the “authority” to stop the landing” (Behind the San Francisco crash, a serious management problem [FR]).
In a factory, an operator identifies a potentially dangerous anomaly but doesn’t dare speak out because of the strict culture of authority. The incident escalates, leading to quality defects on the production line, with all the consequences you can imagine.
CRM values shared leadership, where every team member feels empowered and listened to. A manager should create a climate where pointing out a problem is seen as a constructive and valued act.
What are the business benefits of Crew Resource Management?
For those who jumped straight to this paragraph to save themselves a long read, we can summarize that CRM offers the following benefits.
First and foremost, improved interdisciplinary collaboration. Teams work better together thanks to standardized communication and feedback practices.
Next comes a reduction in human error. By training employees to better understand each other’s processes and responsibilities.
Finally, increased adaptability. Teams become more resilient to the unexpected thanks to better anticipation and proactive resource management.
Crew Resource Management adoption in the enterprise: it’s not taking off
If we look at the glass as half full, we can say that the subject is of interest to many businesses, and that some have already taken action. If we want to see it as half-empty, we can talk about a fairly anecdotal trend.
Crew Resource Management is gaining in popularity in sectors such as finance and healthcare, and even in high-risk industries such as energy, but that’s far from enough to make it a global trend.
Why is this so?
Firstly, because many businesses have never heard of it. By recruiting only people who are familiar with one and only one sector, we avoid importing ideas from elsewhere, and, what’s more, we look only at our own sector and not at ideas to be borrowed from elsewhere.
Secondly, because training teams in CRM-inspired concepts can be perceived as costly or complex to implement.
Then there are cultural reasons: some businesses have a strong culture of hierarchical authority, which is incompatible with CRM’s concepts of shared leadership and assertive communication.
For my part, I also see a huge gap between CRM and the many management training courses that businesses consume.
As I said earlier, many managers are trained in soft skills in all the areas mentioned here. But what’s next? Hopefully, once they’re back in the context of their business, they’ll put them into practice , which is rare in the end: nobody likes to be the exception to the rule, especially when their superiors continue to operate differently.
CRM training, on the other hand, is made mandatory by the International Civil Aviation Organization, the European Union’s Aviation Safety Agency and the Federal Aviation Administration in the USA.
These regulations stipulate that all crew members (pilots, cabin crew, air traffic controllers) must receive initial and recurrent CRM training, focusing on communication, decision-making, error management and teamwork.
Failure to comply with CRM, especially in the event of an accident, can result in crew suspension, a warning, compulsory training… or even dismissal in the most critical cases.
I’d like to come back to the subject of soft skills and other managerial postures. Businesses are well aware of the importance of the subject and what they can get out of it, but they balk at the idea of codifying and imposing anythingin this area (Do you have a delivery model for management?).
When it’s critical, adoption approaches have their limits, and you have to dare to be prescriptive.
A business that crashes doesn’t make the opening of the evening news.
Even before entering into a systematic, operational deployment logic, there is an awareness-raising phase.
Many companies offering airplane simulator services (and even for leisure) also have offers for businesses to raise awareness of collaboration and decision-making under stress.
You teach people the basics of piloting, put them in a cockpit, simulate a breakdown and let them get on with it, giving remote instructions if necessary.
There’s nothing like a cockpit in the dark, with alarms blaring and flashing everywhere , to see how people react under stress. I can tell you, you soon forget you’re in a simulator.
Great for raising awareness, but also for teambuilding.
When I spoke to the boss of such a property, he confirmed the benefits of this approach: a management team of a large business was systematically unable to cooperate and listen to each other, because under stress they lost sight of the objective (landing the plane) and priority management, most often in order to impose their idea. And according to him, this is actually quite systematic.
But a business leader I spoke to once told me that he was totally won over by the approach, but that he couldn’t justify it because of the obstacles mentioned above, and especially not to make it compulsory.
I’ll always remember his phrase: “When a plane crashes, it’s fast, violent, there are fatalities and it’s on the news, but when a business crashes, we die slowly and silently, and no one perceives the seriousness of what we’re doing wrong until it’s too late”.
Same problem, but different collective perception of its criticality.
Bottom line
Whether we’re talking about managing a business, a team or a project, the causes of failure are always the same and are well known.
It’s mainly a question of soft skills and managing communication, collaboration and cognitive load.
The question is not whether we know how to respond, because the solution exists and has been tried and tested, but whether we have the courage not to suggest it, but to impose it.
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