Please pay attention to the safety briefing

What do you do when the air crew ask you to put down your books or devices and pay attention to the safety briefing? Do you follow their advice, because this aircraft may be different to those you have flown on before? Do you study the safety card when the briefing is over? Do you check that you know the location of the life jacket, under your seat or in the compartment next to you? Or do you zone out, diving deeper into the mental limbo that air travel induces, waiting for the moment when you can start reading, scrolling or checking emails again?

I expect that most of us regard the safety briefing as a dull but worthy formality, and don’t pay as much attention as we should. However, I also think that perhaps we should regard it differently, and learn some lessons about how we achieve safety in enterprise technology.

Rather than seeing the safety briefing as somebody else’s problem, a duty which the air crew are obliged to perform, perhaps we should see it as an invitation to participate in our own safety. Because, if the oxygen masks ever did fall from the ceiling, or the plane did make an unexpected landing on water, it would be us who would have to fit the masks over our own faces, or pull the red toggle to inflate the life vest. The air crew would not have time to remind us of the parts of the briefing where we dozed off: they would have to take care of their own safety.

The crew’s announcements also do more than prepare us for the unlikely event of a major disaster. They also remind us about the routine hygiene essential to all flights: to put away loose objects that could bounce around the cabin on take off and landing; and to refrain from smoking in an environment where a fire would be a catastrophe.

If we can learn to regard an airline safety briefing as a joint effort to keep each other safe, and as a way to help everybody to do their part, maybe we can learn to think the same way about some parts of our corporate life.

If you work for a large organisation, you almost certainly have a feeling of creeping dread as the end of the quarter approaches, and your inbox fills up with emails reminding you that you are due for your mandatory training. Perhaps you let those emails pile up until they start to contain words such as ‘overdue’, ‘expired’ and ‘URGENT’. And then you put a couple of hours aside in which to click through the training in as short a time as possible, in order to buy yourself another few months of peace.

Or, if you build software, you have lots of standards that you are supposed to read and controls that you are supposed to apply, probably enforced through assurance and change processes. And, clever person that you are, you figure out the optimum way to navigate these processes, with the prime goal of obtaining approvals to proceed.

These processes, controls and mechanisms can be tedious and dispiriting. They often require rather more attention and effort than an airline safety briefing. However, I believe that it is also possible to approach them in a different spirit: to regard them as invitations to participate in our own safety – and the safety of our systems and the people who use them.

If we think about our various corporate controls in this way, and if we take ownership of their goals, then we have the chance to make them better.

First, we can turn frustration into energy. If you put off training and then click through it mechanically, that implies you believe that it is ineffective in achieving its goals. If you comply with standards and controls to the minimal degree required to achieve compliance, that implies that you do not believe that they are effective standards and controls. Perhaps you could help the people who created that training or developed those standards by letting them know what you think. And perhaps they would value your help and feedback more than reluctant compliance.

Second, if you are the owner of corporate training or standards, there is another lesson to take from airline safety briefings. Airlines and their crews know that their passengers find these briefings boring, and they do work to make them more engaging. A famous British airline has used celebrities and British film tropes in its films, and an international airline I flew with recently used the heritage and history of its country. These don’t always work, but they are at least attempts to make a dry subject more interesting. If, when we develop training and standards, we also remember that our goal is understanding and engagement, not compliance, then they may be more successful.

The risks of enterprise technology are not always as visible or apparent as those involved in air travel. But the systems we build affect the wellbeing of people – people who place their trust in us.  The safety of the technology we build, the people we serve, and the information we handle, is in our hands: it is our duty to pay attention to the safety briefing.

(Views in this article are my own.)