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© 2011 Indunil M Weerasinghe
A balanced scorecard approach to
safety metrics in Aviation
You can’t manage what you don’t measure: a piece of corporate wisdom that is often credited to
management consultant, Peter Drucker. In a nutshell, if you want to manage something effectively,
you need to construct a way of monitoring it. Managing “safety” is no different, yet throws up some
unique challenges.
Aviation organisations are described as “high reliability organisations”. Accidents are generally low in
probability but high in consequence. The ultra-low accident rates mean that this alone is an
insufficient indicator of safety performance. An organisation’s poor safety practices could go un-
noticed, remaining as a latent risk that only comes to attention after a catastrophic accident.
Measuring other indicators could help an organisation gauge its safety performance better.
Unfortunately, “safety” is not a production outcome that is inherently quantifiable. Australia’s national
aviation authority (CASA) reports on this challenge in one of its reviews, citing that: “many studies
only measured subjective perceptions of safety rather than objective measures”. (CASA document ref
XR-2011-002 titled “A systematic review of the effectiveness of safety management systems”). The
ICAO model for safety management does provide guidelines as to where an organisation could find
information on its safety performance, such as hazard reporting, audits, surveys, investigations etc.
However, what is lacking is a methodology for consolidating such findings in an effective manner.
Why exactly is this important? Data – whatever the quantity and quality - are useless unless they can
be interpreted and made sense of. A concise set of safety performance indicators would make it easy
to monitor safety performance and progress, providing management a succinct summary which would
tell them whether safety objectives are being met. For ICAO or any national aviation authority to
define a set of indicators would be ineffective. For one, this would go against the grain of
contemporary regulatory regimes which are outcome based rather than prescriptive. Each
organisation needs the flexibility to devise its own set of indicators, commiserate with its safety policy
and objectives, and taking into account specific organisational complexities.
In other words: there’s no “one size fits all” solution to measuring safety. Any mechanism would need
to provide for some degree of strategic management, recognising that contemporary safety
management calls for a strategic shift in thinking. This would allow an organisation the flexibility to
devise appropriate safety metrics, keeping in line with today’s outcome based regulatory system.
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© 2011 Indunil M Weerasinghe
It follows on therefore that strategic management methods could be applied to the safety context.
Norton & Kaplan’s “Balanced Scorecard” (BSC) is arguably one of the most widely known and
understood methods. (An
excellent synopsis can be found
at the website
www.vectorstudy.com.) The BSC
provides a framework for
establishing, measuring and
monitoring strategic business
performance. The approach is
iterative. The analysis work top-
down by establishing strategic
objectives first and then
systematically working to identify
how these are to be achieved,
ultimately yielding a consolidated
set of Key Performance
Indicators. These KPI’s are grouped into four key “business perspectives”, each of which can be
reinterpreted in the context of our safety management objectives:
1. The “Customer” perspective:
In the BSC, this calls for the organisation to ask: “how should we appear to our customers?” If
we consider the management and employees to be internal customers of the SMS, then this
question in effect represents the organisation’s safety culture. In essence, it asks: “what
attitudes are required to reach our safety objectives?” This forces the organisation not only to
think actively about how it will nurture a better safety culture, but will also provide a
mechanism to monitor it.
2. The “Internal Business Processes” perspective:
In the BSC, this perspective asks “what business process should we excel at?” In the context of
safety, this is questioning: “what behaviours should we excel at to reach our safety
objectives?” This could encompass a wide range of behaviours, for example critical activities
such as hazard analysis and risk management.
3. The “Learning and Growth” perspective:
In the BSC, this question here is “how will we sustain our capability to change and improve?”
This represents a continuous improvement paradigm. In the safety scorecard, the question
Figure 1: Producing a Balanced Scorecard
From “The Measures of Success”
by the Accounts Commission of Scotland
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© 2011 Indunil M Weerasinghe
remains effectively the same, asking: “how will we sustain our capability to improve, to reach
our safety objectives?” This could, for example, entail activities such as safety promotion,
audits, and safety action groups to name a few.
4. The “Financial” perspective:
In the BSC, this perspective is about “how should we appear to our shareholders?” It is
pragmatic to keep in mind that aviation organisations are ultimately financial entities where
“safety at all costs” is not an option. Rather, the objective is that safety management should
contribute to ensuring that risks are contained within levels that are ALARP (as low as
reasonably practical). In other words, safety should be considered as a value proposition and
this element of the scorecard asks: “what is the value addition of our safety management
activities?” Thus the organisation will have a mechanism for evaluating the whether its safety
budget is adequate and being spent wisely.
Whilst this “Safety Scorecard” is by no means a panacea to the complexities of measuring safety
performance, it is anticipated that it could prove to be a useful addition to an organisation’s safety
management toolbox. The
Balanced Scorecard approach is
generally well understood by
senior management in the
corporate environment. It would
therefore be conceptually easy
to grasp and implement. More
importantly, however, as with
many activities to do with safety
management, the true merits of
the method lie in its process and
not merely the end result.
Merely sitting as a Safety Action
Group probing for answers to the questions raised by the Safety Scorecard would guide the
organisation to ever safer operations. To quote the late Arthur Ashe: “success is a journey, not a
destination”.
Contact the author: Further discussion and debate is welcome and encouraged. Please email
indunil.w@orcaanalytics.com or connect on LinkedIn at http://www.linkedin.com/in/indunilmw.
Figure 2: The Safety Scorecard
