Lean Management vs. Crew Resource Management

In commercial aviation, attempts were made for many years to solve the problem of the excessive error rate (accidents) with technical means and procedures printed on paper from the management, Thomas Fengler, coach and pilot.

Lean management is considered the key to competitiveness today.This makes sense insofar as the employees are involved from the very beginning. The optimization of processes, the shifting of responsibility to the executing employees, open information and feedback processes and "leading as a service to the employee" are all principles of lean management - which are also pillars of CRM.

Sources of error

In commercial aviation, attempts were made for many years to solve the problem of the high error rate (accidents) with technical means and procedures printed on paper from management.The people actually affected, namely the crews, were rarely or not at all consulted.Furthermore, until the 1960s, there was a lack of precise analysis facilities for researching the real sources of errors.

It was not until the mandatory, worldwide introduction of flight data recorders and voice recorders in commercial aircraft at the beginning of the 1960s that accident analysis was at all reliably possible. Then came the attempt to solve the still existing problem of high accident rates with even more individual qualification of cockpit crews.

All these attempts failed. The accident rate remained as high as before, and even increased further with the increase in air traffic in the 1980s.

Then, for a short time, the reduction of the cockpit crew to only 2 pilots was brought into play as a source of evil. "Pilot overload due to rationalization pressure" was the headline that traveled through the media. However, analysis of the accidents revealed a mystery: the cockpits of the accident pilots were usually lavishly manned, often with two full crews or, in good old tradition, three.

Only when general helplessness entered the airlines, two large and also by fatal accidents affected airlines such as Lufthansa and United decided to go a completely new way. They dealt with the interaction of people. This hardly required engineers, process specialists or management consultants. What they needed were psychologists, sociologists and communication scientists.

Typical prejudices

Very rarely was technical failure or the fault of an individual the cause of an accident.It was events that led to entire chains of errors, events that in retrospect often cause accident researchers to shake their heads in disbelief. How, for example, could top trained pilots and flight engineers fly a passenger jet without emergency, only to shoot down into a residential area a few miles from the runway due to lack of fuel? - None of this has anything to do with a lack of technical reliability, poorly defined procedures, or even poorly trained or selected crews.

The power of habitt

One thing is obvious: the human tendency to stress reactions, sometimes also error-prone risk-taking and a lack of communication between the parties involved are decisive factors. This creates chains of errors which, in the worst case, end fatally. The way to stop these habits and "grievances" of human interaction is less complex than one might think.

CRM, the solution?

At first, CRM was dismissed by leading captains as psychological boondoggle. The idea of shedding the shiny aura of the hero, the doer and the powerful, and slipping into the role of a true team leader in an open, positive culture of error, first had to be transformed.

That the crew and technicians should also be more than just pretty juice pushers and greasy screwdrivers was beyond the captains' imagination.

Here you will find some answers why the introduction of lean management, respectively CRM often does not have the desired success:

• Models are often only paper tigers.
• Employees and management levels are not included.
• Targets remain only targets.
• Opinions and needs are rarely taken into account.

Now think again of the crew who saw their plane empty and landed without fuel in the front yard of an airport. Here, the experienced old-style captain was the boss, surrounded by very well-trained specialists.None of them stopped it. Not because they didn't see what was happening, but because they didn't dare to say anything clear to their captain and because they believed that he knew what he was doing, because he was the captain. You don't have to understand everything ...

Conclusion

Before CRM really works, a genuine change in thinking would have to take place. The captains would also have to live the management systems, or at least accept them. Only then will the other crew members find confidence in the system. If you apply the same set of rules to the introduction of lean management in companies, you will have the same success.

Then companies work with considerably fewer errors, more efficiently and more competitively.

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