Time to switch?

‘Switch’ calls up the research of Carol Dweck, Professor of Psychology at Stanford, who established these mindset terms and her research results appear to be clear – “to reach your full potential, you need a growth mindset”.

The professional pilot clearly needs a growth mindset to nurture a passion for continuing development throughout their career. The old adage of ‘the day you stop learning is the day you are finished’ is especially relevant. Just because you have 20,000 hours doesn’t mean you have nothing to learn – it can simply mean you have to be ever more creative in identifying and applying better behaviours.

The challenge for the professional pilot is to not only opt for a growth mindset, but to actively pursue learning experiences to continually refresh safety buffers. As you approach the safety-critical 4,000 hours of application experience or around the 40 years-old mark, you should be redoubling your efforts to combat the complacency and the creeping tolerance of additional risk that can be corrosive to safety buffers.

So, can people change their mindset and improve their performance? The research certainly indicates this is not only possible, but that it can make a significant difference to schoolkids, businesses, surgeons and any organisation or individual interested in continuous improvement.

The progress of aviation safety would have stopped dead in its tracks years ago if people believed that whatever we had was about as good as it was going to get – in other words, a ‘fixed’ mindset. That underpinning drive towards ‘better’ is what characterises the success of high-reliability industries such as aviation.

But could a ‘growth’ mindset also be an opportunity for a regulator struggling to recover from a wholesale loss of trust from industry? While cultural change is clearly required over time, there is strong evidence that one of the most effective ways to change culture is to change behaviour first.

In many ways, the ongoing delink between the cultural building blocks being created by the executive of CASA and the ‘old’ behaviours of the rest of the organisation is very difficult for industry to understand. CASA’s problems now centre on a lack of production. There is a huge amount of ‘process’ going on, but it is yet to produce the goods.

Industry people are regularly held accountable for performance and outcomes – not just process. An engine 80 per cent rebuilt is still not an engine. The only acceptable outcome is 100 per cent rebuilt.

Industry has produced a mountain of evidence that new regulations have actually stopped safe activities, but almost as quickly as issues are identified, new ones are being created by inconsistent or plain wrong interpretations.

Industry is doing everything it can to facilitate CASA’s repair – engagement with project officers in drafting instruments, providing submissions, sitting on committees, identifying issues and suggesting ways forward. The problem seems to lie between the heated agreement that there is a problem and a remedy and the failure to execute what has been agreed.

Perhaps by adopting a ‘growth’ mindset, CASA could rapidly start building up a series of relatively small ‘wins’ – such as successful exemptions developed with industry to remedy problems created by Parts 61 and 141 – which could then lead to increasingly bolder and more effective behaviours. Eventually this will lead to greater trust and a very different culture at work.

But to start, we need breakthrough achievements to reset the trajectory and to establish different goalposts and better, faster methods. Industry is not the enemy, cooperation is not weak and delivering positive change is not ‘losing’.

It is simply not enough to say to staff “we are changing”. It has to be demonstrated by behaviours that spell out what change means. And good behaviour can be contagious.

AAAA Convention, Surfers Paradise, June 15-16 A great line-up of speakers – including the original ‘Dr Feelgood’ and our top regulators – will be a feature of the annual AAAA Convention at the Surfers Paradise Marriott Resort. The two main days – Wednesday the 15th and Thursday the 16th of June – will include trade displays and engineers, pilots and rotary meetings. Registration and program are available from the AAAA website – www. aerialag. com. au.

There is a huge amount of ‘process’ going on, but it is yet to produce the goods.