Crew Resource Management Saves Lives
Crew Resource Management (CRM) was born out of tragedy. In 1977, the worst aviation disaster in history occurred on the runway of Tenerife Airport when two Boeing 747s collided, killing 583 people. Investigations revealed not mechanical failure, but communication breakdowns, authority gradients, and poor decision-making as primary causes. In response, the aviation industry recognized the need for a systemic approach to human factors in safety-critical environments. Thus, CRM was developed to improve team communication, situational awareness, problem-solving, decision-making, and leadership in the cockpit.
Originally coined by NASA in 1979 as “Cockpit Resource Management,” the concept emphasized optimizing the use of all available resources—human, hardware, and information—to ensure safe flight operations. Over time, the scope widened beyond the cockpit, becoming “Crew” Resource Management and spreading to other high-stakes industries like healthcare and nuclear energy.
While software engineering does not directly deal with life-or-death decisions, it shares similarities with aviation: it is complex, collaborative, involves human and machine collaboration and often operates under high pressure and uncertainty. Software teams can benefit immensely from adopting CRM principles in the following areas:
Communication: Clear, Concise, Closed-Loop
CRM emphasizes clear, assertive, and closed-loop communication. Pilots are trained to confirm and verify instructions, minimizing ambiguity. In software teams, especially those distributed across time zones or working asynchronously, miscommunication is a common source of bugs, delays, and friction. Adopting closed-loop communication—where the sender confirms a message was received and understood—can reduce errors in software deployment, code handoffs, and incident response.
In incident response situations (e.g., a system outage), structured communication tools like Slack incident channels or PagerDuty war rooms can benefit from CRM-style brevity and confirmation:
“Restarting service A now. ETA 2 minutes.”
“Copy that. Watching logs.”
Flattening Authority Gradients
CRM broke the tradition of hierarchical decision-making in cockpits. Co-pilots were encouraged to challenge captains if safety was compromised. Similarly, in software teams, especially in DevOps and Site Reliability Engineering (SRE), it is critical that junior developers feel empowered to raise concerns or propose alternatives—even if they contradict a tech lead or CTO.
Software Example: Retrospectives that encourage “blameless postmortems” reflect this CRM mindset. They promote psychological safety so that all team members, regardless of title, can contribute honestly and constructively.
Situational Awareness
Pilots are trained to constantly assess their environment and anticipate what could go wrong. In software, situational awareness translates to understanding system dependencies, recognizing warning signs of failure, and anticipating the impact of code changes.
Monitoring dashboards, real-time alerting, and observability tools (like Prometheus, Grafana, or Honeycomb) help developers maintain situational awareness during deployment or high-traffic events.
Decision-Making Under Pressure
CRM teaches systematic decision-making using models like the “DECIDE” model: Detect, Estimate, Choose, Identify, Do, Evaluate. Software engineers—especially on-call engineers—often make critical decisions under time constraints, such as rolling back a deployment or rerouting traffic.
Runbooks and incident playbooks help standardize responses and reduce cognitive load during high-stress situations, just as checklists do for pilots.
Training, Simulation, and Continuous Learning
Aviation uses simulators to rehearse emergencies. Software teams are increasingly adopting similar approaches: chaos engineering, game days, and tabletop incident simulations.
Tools like Gremlin or AWS Fault Injection Simulator allow teams to inject controlled failures into systems, testing resilience and team response—akin to flight simulators for production infrastructure.
CRM transformed aviation from an industry plagued by human-error-driven disasters into one of the safest modes of transportation. Its lessons—centered on humility, collaboration, communication, and systems thinking—offer a blueprint for software teams navigating complexity. By adopting CRM principles, software organizations can build more resilient systems, cultivate healthier team dynamics, and reduce the risk of catastrophic failures—not of aircraft, but of services, systems, and trust.
In both the skies and the cloud, success depends not just on individual brilliance, but on collective coordination. CRM reminds us that great teams fly—and ship—better together.