Safety Risk Management Methodologies: Overview of SRM Methods and Analysis Based on Systems Thinking
The international regulator auditing the methods its own industry uses to assess risk, and the clearest available statement that the dominant instrument does not do what its users assume. Guidance from ICAO's Safety Management Panel, produced after the 2018 Air Navigation Conference tasked it with widening the range of methodologies open to safety managers.
The useful move is to turn Rasmussen's seven systems thinking tenets, as summarised by Dallat, Salmon and Goode, into an audit instrument, running from multiple actors and levels through feedback and external pressure to the migration of work practices and the erosion of defences it produces. Seven methods are scored against each tenet as yes, no or possible. The risk matrix, the default apparatus of corporate safety management almost everywhere, answers no to five of the seven. STPA and FRAM are the only two answering yes to all seven.
A second table sorts the same methods by system type and inverts the picture. In simple systems the risk matrix, Bowtie, ISO 31000, SORA and ARMS are all rated relevant while STPA and FRAM are qualified; in complex systems the risk matrix and Bowtie are the only two whose limitations are rated as impossible to ignore. Every method simplifies without exception, so the choice is a trade between the gap simplification opens between model and world and the resources needed to close it.
Read it as what it is: guidance, not research. It presents no data, its ratings are the panel's judgement rather than a measured result, it is version 1.0 with no DOI, and it states plainly that it cannot offer reliable advice because organisational specificities are unique and ever-changing. Psychological safety is never mentioned. The bridge is Rasmussen's own, through migration and erosion: a method blind to drift cannot see conditions accumulating, and neither can a climate survey that measures how people feel this quarter rather than where the practices have moved.
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