Continuous Improvement: Finding the Balance Between Safety and Practicality

Continuous improvement is a principle that every safety and compliance professional embraces. It’s about looking for ways to do things better, safer, and more efficiently, one step at a time. But there’s a point where improvement can tip over from helpful to harmful.

Finding the balance: where safety and efficiency meet in aviation operations

The Arc of Improvement

Picture an arc. At the left base, there’s plenty of room to improve safety. Procedures can be clarified, processes streamlined, and hazards eliminated. Every step you take upward increases safety and operational resilience.

But as you climb toward the top of the arc, the gains become smaller. Eventually, you reach the peak, where additional tightening no longer improves safety. Beyond this point, further “improvements” can start to hurt.

Why? Because the focus shifts from doing the task safely to following the procedure perfectly. At this stage, checklists, forms, and processes risk overshadowing situational awareness and sound judgment. People may start working to please the procedure instead of protecting the operation.

The Safety Space

This is where balance comes in. Think of a “safety space” as the point between operational safety and financial reality.

Too far toward safety? The aircraft never leaves the ground.

Too far toward cost-cutting? Safety and security checks are rushed or skipped.

Neither extreme is acceptable. The sweet spot, the safety space, is where procedures protect people and assets and the operation remains efficient.

Example: Turnaround Time

Finance-driven thinking often pushes for shorter turnarounds to increase aircraft utilization. Safety-driven thinking could go to the other extreme, making turnarounds so long that the operation becomes unsustainable.

In reality, most operators find their safety space somewhere between 30 and 60 minutes, enough time for safety and security checks to be done thoroughly, without creating unnecessary delays.

Final Thought

Continuous improvement isn’t about endlessly adding more rules or making procedures tighter just for the sake of it. It’s about finding the point where safety, efficiency, and practicality meet, and staying there.

When the arc starts curving downward, it’s time to stop tightening and start listening to the people who do the job every day. That’s where real safety lives.