Textbook of Usability

Crew Resource Management (CRM) is a set of training programmes and procedures that emphasise non-technical skills for safety — communication, coordination, decision-making, and teamwork — within flight crews and other safety-critical teams. Developed in aviation in the 1970s and 1980s after accident investigations showed that individual technical competence was not enough, CRM recognises that safety is a team and system property.

Key CRM principles:

• Shared mental models — all crew members should have a common understanding of the current situation
• Assertive communication — junior crew members should speak up when they observe a problem, and senior members should listen
• Workload management — tasks should be distributed to avoid overloading any one person
• Decision-making protocols — structured approaches to decisions under time pressure
• Situation awareness — continuous updating of understanding as conditions change
• Closed-loop communication — explicit acknowledgment and read-back of critical instructions

CRM emerged from landmark accident investigations in which technically skilled crews failed because of communication and coordination breakdowns. United Airlines Flight 173 (1978) crashed because the crew was so focused on a landing gear problem that they ran out of fuel — a failure of workload management that became a founding case study for CRM.

CRM principles have spread to:

• Healthcare — operating room team training, surgical safety checklists
• Software engineering — blameless postmortems, pair programming, on-call rotations
• Nuclear power, maritime, emergency response

The underlying insight — that safety requires team skills as well as individual expertise — has become a central tenet of modern safety engineering.