For starters, it occurs to me that the question of "What is CRM?",
has exploded in the past few years. Everything from human relations in
the cockpit, the hierarchy of command, decision making skills, time and
resource / information managment and a whole pile of other issues,
depending on who you talk to, are all lumped together under the title of
CRM.
1) Therefor, I would have to say that my first vote would go to
developing a library of real world examples of good, and not so good,
instances of CRM in action. This is much easier said than done, because
it would require the agreement of representatives from various areas
(managment, crew etc.) as to what constitutes good CRM performance.
2) From this bank of examples we could define what characteristics
set the good crews apart from the not so good crews. This could be the
basis for developing some good generic operational definitions, that
would apply to any situation involving multiperson crews, whether it be
in the cockpit, in a maintenance capacity, or a non-aviation situation.
This is the beginning of a CRM metric, that I think has to be a starting
point.
3) With a data base of real life examples and a generic CRM metric
in hand, then we could tackle the issues of assessing, training and
developing scenerios. Also, once we had a general idea of what skills we are
trying to train (what ever it is we determined the CRM metric to be), then
we could modify the training progam to an occupation specific, or aircraft
specific, or airline specific program and scenerios.
Jason Lawrence
York University, Toronto, Canada
jlawrenc_at_yorku.ca