Diversity of perspective – safety and team resources management

Max

There are at least three types of truths –

Alternative truths: (actually “alternative facts”) a term coined by a US counsellor and synonym with “fake news”,

Objective truths: that deal with things that can be objectively measured against an agreed standard and therefore the result either is or is not – for example, 5NM separation minimum either is or is not if measured by a well-calibrated mode. And

Subjective truths: those things that are true (or false) to us because we analyse them against what we know, how we experience what happened and against our values and believes. For example,  from where I stand it is true to me that the sun is a sphere of white/yellow colour which emits both light and heat.

The focus of this post is on subjective truth and diversity of perspectives:

A subjective truth, as the term entails, is true to the subject experiencing it. Someone close to the north pole, who has not had access to any scientific explanation of what the sun is, could say that the sun is a yellow circle that appears on the horizon and which emits light. Both this person and I hold an experience of what the sun is, and no one can tell us that what we experience is untrue – even though objectively the sun has other characteristics that neither I nor this person can experience and therefore describe as part of their truth.

Now, bringing this thought to air traffic control, where our job is primarily to achieve and maintain objective truths such as minimum safety standards, I believe that sometimes we mix up what is objectively a fact and the subjective truths we derive from experiencing situations1. We forget that in the realm of subjective truths, these truths can vary to a large degree between peers and we also forget that the aim is not to debate on who is right or wrong – which makes no sense, but to sum up these truths to make up something richer.

Put in another way, when we experience something, we all get a perspective of that event, based on our prior knowledge, our values and believes and our position relative to the event. A team is stronger to analyse a particular event because the diversity of perspective that a team has is richer than the mono-perspective of each of the individuals. This diversity of perspective then helps us to make better sense of the situation, it enables learning between the individuals and improves decision making.

So where does Team Resources Management fit into all of this?

The way TRM is delivered, through facilitated sessions around, for example, exercise or case studies, allows those who participate to get off the “act” – “react” loop of ATC and delve into more of introspection of the experiences which mark differences in one´s professional career. It creates, to those participating, an environment of sharing in which all perspectives are valued. The results of this are at least two-fold: First, it allows us to realise once more that our experiences lie in the realm of subjective (and not objective) truths, and that several versions do exist and all are valid. Second, that when the subject in discussion in a TRM session arrives at items very close to our operational home, it gives us the diversity of perspective that is one of the main enablers for learning and for a richer (call it augmented) experience of the professional world around us.

Needless to say, that this richness derived from diversity of perspective will, in turn, improve the safety in our teams, as our teams are then wiser about the particular subject of discussion and from the knowledge that a team holds more pieces of the puzzle than the individual usually has.

 

1 that experience can be either a direct or an indirect one.

Why do we investigate?

Renald Galea

The no-prize answer is ‘because we have to’. The correct one is because we cannot afford not to.

ICAO Annex 13 lays out the consolation that ‘the sole objective of the investigation of an […] incident shall be the prevention of […] incidents. It is not the purpose of this activity to apportion blame or liability’. The tangible outcome of an incident investigation is the Investigation Report housing sections on Factual Information, Analysis, and Conclusions. It only stands to reason that Factual Information has to be obtained and suitably analysed for conclusions be drawn as to WHAT actually happened, and WHY it happened. Now comes the sticky part, for the Investigator is also tasked with coming up with Safety Recommendations. I admit that, as an Incident Investigator, I have often slept uneasy over this last responsibility. I have gathered and examined written and verbal reports, I have listened to voice recordings and transcribed them, I have watched the video recordings of the occurrence or the radar screen as well as the relative keyboard inputs, I have interviewed all involved and obtained as much information as to what was happening. I have made myself familiar with all the circumstances at the time. Armed with all available data, I have absolutely no problem with reaching conclusions about causal and contributing factors. On these I am now an authority. But to make recommendations? I look back to the courses I attended, and the training seminars I endured (and lately made others endure), and note with disappointment that this ultimate ‘must do’ has, all-too-often, been very much glossed over. We make it sound as if coming up with recommendations is simply a natural follow-up to all the digging made, and these will simply fall into the lap of the deserving. The bad news is that this is far from it.

I can put suggestions on how to right obvious shortcomings; I can also extrapolate the actual happening to include ‘what if’ scenarios and decide if the available procedures or resources carry enough resiliency. But I have, at times, felt insufficiently equipped to confidently reassure myself that I have covered all possible recommendations. Is it enough to point out that inappropriate phraseology was a contributing factor to a runway incursion? Or, that better employment of speed control could have averted an unwholesome situation? Or, that letters of agreement between sectors do not cover all eventualities? I question myself, should I spell out a recommendation that personnel attend mandatory phraseology or speed control refresher training? Or oblige the powers that be to revisit procedures? What if I overlook a recommendation which could avert another incident in the future? Should I conscientiously take responsibility for my recommendations to not adversely impact my company financially? Should I even be questioning myself about such? Uneasy is the head that wears the headset marked Incident Investigator.

Making recommendations is an onerous responsibility. A medical doctor, having examined the patient and carried out the required tests, writes out the appropriate chemicals to be ingested to right the ailment. The Investigator prescribes appropriate remedial attention to avert a repetition of an unpleasant happening. The patient implicitly puts his trust in the good doctor and happily downs pink capsules before meals; the system trusts the recommendations to be the best cure to a malady. The recommendations being delivered, the ANSP decides if they should be implemented: whether in their entirety or in part, the method and the timing. The Investigator’s report is only testament to her findings coupled with her experience; it is the ANSP’s call to implement the corrections. The entity is answerable to its clients, its professionals, and the overseeing Authority.

Approaching summer of 2020, we are in a shell-shocked state. We do not know what the postdiluvian world will look like. Regarding Investigator training, we have, in recent years, witnessed the progressive reduction of the instruction and practice period. One can only assume these will be decreased even further. e-TOKAI* has wonderfully enabled the reporting and investigation process to be conveniently wrapped up in a seamless package with a deliverable document rolling out at the other end. The Tool has taken out the hassle and intricacies of building a report while ensuring that all possible data is collected. Investigation reports have become more standardised, coherent and thorough. e-TOKAI sees to that. Sadly, the free-text areas can be more disappointing. Investigator training, even more limited as it might evolve, will continue to train candidates in data gathering, interviewing techniques and gaining personnel trust, but more consideration should be given to the quality of report writing.

Writing reports is an art form. The writer has to keep the intended consumer in mind. The report culminates in the Recommendations area, and the Investigator has to ‘sell’ her recommendations in the most convincing manner. A badly structured report will not inspire a sale, and a badly written one will only alienate its audience, rendering the exercise futile.

At the end of a report come the recommendations. Mine is to revisit the Investigator training material, give e-TOKAI its room to do what it does best, and better employ time and resources to train our professionals to construct better reports and put forward meaningful recommendations.

We cannot afford otherwise.

* e-TOKAI is Eurocontrol´s toolkit for air traffic management occurrence investigation.

Renald Galea is an Air Traffic Controller with vast experience as an Incident Investigator and the use of e-TOKAI and RAT.

Supporting ATC students during COVID pandemic – Ingenav´s experience

Max

At the beginning of April, we put up announcements on Linked-in and Facebook offering help with theory and or radar techniques to students who had their training interrupted because of the COVID pandemic. This help would be delivered for free as part of our initiative to help our sector in times of need.

Surprisingly for us, only a few students contacted us for help and they needed reinforcement in practical skills training.

During the months of April and May, we remotely delivered Approach and En-Route Surveillance skills training using PORT – ROSE Simulation Online ATC Simulator platform and our own exercises. Our instructors ran over 50 exercises with these students, adapted to their level of proficiency and helping them to maintain the skills they had learned already in their schools and to learn certain new ones.

From our side, we learned better how to deliver skills training remotely. We have learned that whereas face to face contact and feedback helps in certain cases, it is not necessary 100% of the time. A blend of presential and remote/online skills training is possible. We learned that briefings and debriefings are perfectly possible in an online space and that today the technology to execute and remotely monitor a student during simulation is perfectly possible and highly performant.

From the feedback we received at the end of these sessions, we see that the students, apart from being very appreciative of the gesture, they valued the following in particular:

  • The fact that someone else was giving a parallel and fresh viewpoint on problem-solving and radar skills, that complemented that which was thought in their school.
  • They could experiment outside of their official school program. Experimentation included: different separation techniques (vectors, vertical with rates of climb/descent, etc. ), coordination techniques, analysis of aircraft performance within the decision-making process, coordination, approaches including ILS and visual approaches.
  • Students did not find not having face-to-face interaction with the instruction a hindrance to their development.
  • The empathy and availability of the instructor during these difficult times was what they were looking for.
  • The possibility to continue practising radar skills and to avoid or at least reduce skill degradation.

In conclusion, offering free ATC training during the COVID pandemic has been a very positive experience for us at Ingenav, and from the feedback, we received a positive experience for the students who participated. Large amounts of ATC practical training can be done remotely. The technology permits it and the methodology fits well. We are considering repeating this at a later stage!

Automation and Human Centricity – Three-tier human centricity. Position paper.

Max

There should be little doubt or argument that the journey towards further automation in Air Traffic Control is well on its way and is set to continue. Also, there is little doubt that many of the future solutions will have, at least, some of their components based on Artificial Intelligence techniques.

If we look at SESAR´s Level of Automation Taxonomy (LOAT) model as displayed below,  

most modern ATC Systems are somewhere between B4/B5: High level – full automation support of information analysis and C1: Artefact-supported Decision Making.

The end goal for most R&D projects is to arrive to D8: Full automation of action sequence execution for all ATC tasks.

This raises a few items to consider and this is what we at Ingenav think about this:

  1. Until D8 is reached on all ATC tasks (whether it will be desirable for it to be reached is the subject of item 2), humans will be part of the system and the system will need to be Human-Centric.
  2. It is questionable whether, even if technologically possible, it would be desirable to reach D8 and have a non-human-in-the-system ATC chain.

Developing these items, a little further we need to consider:

  1. A three-tier Human-Centric approach is necessary:

Human-Centricity needs to be seen holistically:

The design of an ATC system needs to be done through a human-centric approach. The result, i.e. the ATC system itself needs to be human-centric. And with the growing autonomy coming about, one shall not forget that the end-user of ATC is not the air traffic controller but the airspace user: the human who flies the aircraft. These are the three tiers – from the design, to the product itself, to its output.

Starting from Tier 3: Human-Centric design:

The design of an ATC system shall be led by its usability and by its interaction with the holistic system first. Rather than having a technology-led design in which the “what can be done” is defined first and the “how” is done later, human-centric design requires agile development cycles between definition – prototyping – human in the system testing – adjustments – redefinition and advancements. The design team needs to incorporate from a very early stage operational expertise that understands the business and the process and that co-lead the design. This should be the case even when the functionalities that are being developed would be in the high Ds in accordance with LOAT as these will always interact with other processes where the human is involved.

Tier 2: Human-Centric system:

The result of the design – i.e. the product, needs to fully integrate the human as part of the system and not its operator or the mortar which glues together the imperfections created by the other parts. A Human-Centric system understands how the human works and integrates the human´s processes into the overall system. Principles such as relevance, timeliness, prioritized and rationalized for human understanding should be key in all the interactions of a human-centric system.

Tier 1: Human-Centric outputs:

It may sound obvious but it is often taken for granted: an ATC system acts as an intermediate; it is a safety net and an efficiency boost to air traffic and airspace users (that is the objective of ATC!). It is airspace users who execute the instructions generated by ATC. Until further notice, aircraft will be flown by humans. The instructions provided by ATC need to keep that in mind. So far, this has been taken for granted because the human-in-the-system at the ATC level automatically made the adjustment. However, in a scenario where some of the instructions are not generated by a human, the system has to keep in mind they will be executed by one.

It is important to insist on Human-Centricity and the human-in-the-system principle and not to see the human as an external agent who acts as an operator or a mediator, or even worse as a corrector of imperfections. It is important to take the learnings we have made in the past decades and build on them rather than to try to discard them because we believe that advanced automation will make the human somehow less important.

Question 2: is it desirable to arrive to D8?

The quick answer to this is that we don´t know. To date, we do not have the maturity to understand what a fully autonomous system, which in turn is an intermediate between vigilance and execution, would mean. The gap to get there is still too big and we need to narrow this gap in order to understand better the ramifications. Of the ramifications, we are able to identify to date one can include resilience, of such a system and degraded modes, interconnectiblity, responsibility, certification, the holistic concept of operations of the airspace user and societal (is it, in fact, desirable and productive from a societal perspective to try to eliminate the human from the system?).

R&D in this area must continue and needs to be holistic and not just technology-driven. We can do a lot of things but should we apply them? By continuing R&D, the sector will mature further and whilst bridging the gap, we will also understand the opportunities and the threats that such changes would bring. If we ever reach D8, it should be an evolution and not a revolution.

Conclusion

Undoubtedly, work is in progress towards advanced automation in the lines of decision-making support and basic autonomous execution of tasks. Human-Centricity is primordial in the development of such tools and this human-centricity needs to be taken care of in 3-tiers: at design, at the system and at output levels. Achieving D8: full automation of task execution for all tasks making up ATC should be an R&D goal and not an operational one at this stage. The gap between the current paradigm and that one is too wide and we do not have the maturity to understand the ramifications of such a change. R&D needs to be holistic and not just technology-driven. A stepwise approach towards understanding will be necessary.

 

PS Ingenav is currently participating in a project with a Core European ANSP and ATC system manufacturer to introduce Decision Support Operational ATC tools using amongst other historical data and machine learning principles. In this project, a 3-tier Human-Centric approach is being applied.

A big thank you to our pool of instructors – we´ll be back!

Max

With this post, we at Ingenav wish to thank our closely knitted pool of instructors who have helped us in the past years to deliver high-quality training services to our clients, with a very high rate of repeat business.

Until early March, and the COVID-19 outbreak in Europe, our network of active instructors originated from 7 different European countries. Together, we were regularly delivering services to clients in 5 countries.

The dedication, experience and qualifications of our instructors are high, and so is the cross-fertilization that was taking place between our pool, all learning from what the other had to offer.

Thank you to all those concerned for your hard work. This tough containment period is hopefully almost over, the time to be back in action is drawing nearer!

We´ll be back!

Sleep is your superpower

Max

Sleep is your superpower – this is the name of the TED conference delivered by Matt Walker, a sleep and brain scientist. The video is embedded hereunder.

Indeed, sleep affects performance and health and therefore safety, which is the raison d´être of our business.

Over the years that we have been delivering Human Performance and Safety related courses and programmes, the importance of sleep (and quality sleep) has become salient.

As Matt says in the video, lack of sleep affects our performance. In other studies, lack of sleep is also shown to be responsible for mood swings and deficiencies in interpersonal behaviours. One could say that sleep deficiency affects directly all the Team Resources Management areas we discuss during our TRM programmes, namely: Teamwork, Communication, Situational Awareness, Decision Making and Stress Management. At one point during the video, Matt says “Sleep loss will leak down into every nook and cranny of your physiology, even tampering with the very DNA nucleic alphabet that spells out your daily health narrative.” One could also say that “Sleep loss will also leak down into every nook and cranny of our personal and interpersonal performance, with potentially serious consequences to ATC operations and safety.”

This is not to mention all the health issues associated with lack of sleep. (watch the video)

Indeed, sleep is our superpower. It affects all aspects of our lives, the personal and the professional one.

A modular approach to a roster management tool, and a bespoke experience for the client.

Max

A Korean saying has it that “Even children of the same mother look different.” This holds true for how ATC units organise Air Traffic Controller Rosters:

Some units organise their controllers in teams, others work on individual rosters.

Some units consist of 10 persons and a maximum of 2 sectors, others include hundreds of ATCOs and tens of sectors.

Some units only work on one rating, whereas others work across 2 or more, with their staff not necessarily qualified on all ratings and/or sectors.

Some plan their staff dynamically depending on traffic forecasts and sector openings, others have fixed seasonal plans and cycles.

Some are short of staff (or were, as we speak) and others do not have staffing issues.

All have rules about publication and change management, but most of these rules are then different.

All have rules about resting times, but virtually none are the same.

And the differences continue, with the only constants being two:

  • They are all ATCO roster and
  • They are all different!

With this knowledge in front of us, we decided that it will be very difficult to commercialise a one size fits all solution. Instead of offering a standard approach, we started developing programme modules which would allow us to offer our clients the product they need, based on building blocks we already have (modules) AND which are in turn adapted as necessary for the client.

So, in the meantime we have a fully-fledged roster management tools and also individual elements which allow us to:

  • Count working shifts and other elements per ATCO– that can then be used for ensuring spread across sectors or spread of work across periods (like weeks/months, etc.), or to count overtime or for other purposes.
  • Link ATCOs and their ratings and unit endorsements with the sectors
  • Have different rostering ´templates´ so as to cover different sector opening scenarios.
  • Deal with resting time rules as prescribed by the client.
  • Allow changes of shifts between ATCOs
  • Have different roles set within the tool and workflows for information and approvals between various roles.
  • Notification mechanisms
  • Etc.

The roster management module is part of our ARM (ATCO Resource Management) suite and can be connected to the competence management module. The latter would then monitor competence compliance (expiry of endorsements, dates for assessments and training, etc).

Would you like a private demo of our tool, please do not hesitate to drop us a mail…

Work in time of a pandemic

Max

For us, the beginning of the rest of our venture started during the week of the 9th of March. During that week we were supposed to take part in the World ATM Congress in Madrid, we were supposed, as we did in previous years, to meet and catch up with a number of friends, suppliers and clients. The congress got cancelled one week prior.

During the week of the 9th of March, academies to which we were giving support suspended their training. Workshops which we were planned to facilitate got postponed…Roughly 80% of our contracted work got postponed to a newer date. (same happened to our planned income).

Importantly, during the week of the 9th of March, we had instructors working for us in Spain, Sweden and Belgium who had to find their way back to their places of residence in other countries. One of them got stuck whilst his country closed its borders to commercial international flights. He had to be repatriated via a service organised by his country´s embassy. We were all worried. The first priority was to get everyone home. That all went finally well. We then cancelled the OJTI/STDI – CA Refresher courses which were planned to take place at our premises in Madrid.

During the week of the 9th of March, a year, which was pencilled as a good year, was redrawn in being what it is at the time of writing: a year of instability, of great unknowns, of the knowledge that things will be different for a very long while, of the knowledge that we don´t know how they will be different.

Since the week of the 16th of March, we have been doing what we can do: we have restructured our balance sheets and taken measures to survive as long as possible, using our company cash surplus and adjusting everyone´s incomes in a thin balance between keeping everyone afloat and the company itself afloat. We have started planning on ways of how we could strengthen our knowledge, work on the back-log of things we had, imagine our business in the medium to longer term. Work on those things which will make us better.

We have started offering free support to student air traffic controllers worldwide who have seen their training be suspended, as is our own way of giving something back of what we know, during these hard times. We are trialling, together with other schools and ANSPs,  Rose´s PORT: A fully-fledged online ATC simulator, developed by our partner Rose-Simulators. We have created a facebook page to exchange a different kind of partner/user, and we have just created this blog.

Content-wise we are looking at how we can deliver some of our courses through distance learning. We are adding a Competency Component to our ARM (ATCO Resource Management) Suite, and more and more things.

Things are not all bleak, even if they are truly difficult times; having to survive by eating in on the little fat you managed to save in the previous years, and living worried that all that we worked for in the past years will be dismantled by a force majeure. This experience is hopefully serving us to reinvent ourselves, to offer better services in the future, to reflect on our place in the world, as individuals, as professionals and as a company. 

Hope we see the other side of the tunnel. If we fail it will not be due to not trying to do our best. If we succeed, even if we will come out thinner, our fibre will be stronger than it has ever been.

More to come on this blog, on the rest of our social media and on our daily contacts with all our friends and partners….hello Ingenav-blog you are the child of a new era.