Culture, error, and crew resource management.

Abstract

The latest CRM programs explicitly focus on error and its management. CRM training, in its current state, can best be described as one of the critical interventions that can be used by organizations in the interests of safety. More specifically, pilot CRM skills provide countermeasures against risk and error in the form of threat and error avoidance, detection, and management. In the period just prior to the birth of these new programs, CRM training had been successfully applied to the U.S. and Western cockpit environments, although its acceptance was not universal. As we observed these cockpit programs applied mindlessly to non-Western pilot groups and nonpilot groups such as flight attendants, maintenance personnel, dispatch, and even to nuclear power plant and refinery operations, we began to see the effectiveness of the programs slipping. We tried two approaches. We initiated a new research program into the dimensions of national culture relevant to the aviation environment and CRM training in particular. By knowing more about national cultures we could begin to design CRM programs that were culturally sensitive and that would have greater impact on line operations. The pilot cul-ture, and that of individual organizations, also began to be understood as relevant to the success and failure of CRM programs. Simultaneously, we began to revisit the basic concepts of CRM in the hope of better explicating its goals and objectives. Perhaps there were universal objectives that could be derived that applied to pilots of all nations, and even to nonpilot groups. The marriage of these cultural research programs (What aspects of CRM should be tailored to specific organizations and cultures?) and a “back to basics” attempt to refine the goals and objectives of CRM(What are the universal goals?) produced the new generation of CRM programs that we describe as error management CRM (see Helmreich & Foushee, 1993; Helmreich & Merritt, 1998; Helmreich & Wilhelm, 1991; Helmreich, Merritt, & Wilhelm, 1999; Merritt & Helmreich, 1997; and Salas, Fowlkes, Stout, Milanovich, & Prince, 1999, for discussions of the evolution of CRM and outcomes of CRM training).