*5.2. Implications for Practitioners*

The proposed structured approach was tested in the aviation maintenance area. However, the method could be applied in other areas within or outside the aviation industry. It might be of particular interest to other high-reliability organisations (HROs), such as oil and gas, nuclear power generation, health care, or wildland firefighting [80,81]. This is supported by the fact that the structured approach could make the development of Bowtie somewhat simpler and hence promote the broader application of Bowtie.

The framework provides non-risk experts with a tool to perform risk assessment. Operators, who may have limited risk managemen<sup>t</sup> skills but a better knowledge of the system and processes than a risk analyst, might use the tool to identify threats, consequences, and means of prevention and mitigation. The framework encapsulates a wide range of previous known areas relevant to risk assessment and ensures that most common and obvious threats, consequences and barriers are not missed. Furthermore, it enables the analyst to put the emphasis on the threat, consequence, and barrier identification, rather than on the construction of the diagram itself. The conceptual work could also be used to structure the accompanying brainstorming sessions of the Bowtie development process, which has the potential to overcome some of the limitations mentioned in Section 2.4.

The categorisation of threats and consequences may help to better address them by appropriate means. Categorising barriers in turn may help practitioners to gain a better overview of the types of barriers in place and how diverse a threat or consequence path is in terms of barrier types. Furthermore, it may help to identify appropriate and efficient barriers that prevent more than one threat or consequence path, i.e., barriers that occur on multiple paths. This could be beneficial when identifying and eliminating ineffective barriers or barriers that only prevent one path, and rather improve barriers that prevent multiple threats. This brings in a managemen<sup>t</sup> perspective of barrier prioritisation and investment strategies.

The idea of cascading consequence could allow an organisation to break the complex MRO process down into smaller blocks and perform a risk assessment for each of these process steps with the relevant process experts. This goes along with the previously mentioned practicability of the proposed method by non-risk analysts and may improve the quality of the Bowtie diagrams.
