Healthcare is perhaps the most complex safety-critical sector, and the challenges have only increased throughout the COVID-19 pandemic. Increasingly, human and organisational factors have come under the spotlight. Manoj Kumar is a consultant general surgeon with a background also in safety, human factors, and training. In this conversation with Steven Shorrock, Manoj provides insights and perspectives on the realities of work in healthcare, and the team’s role in improvement.
This article is a reproduction of an article published in HindSight magazine issue 28 in February 2019 on the…
On major projects, some surprises unfold slowly via ‘work-as-imagined solutioneering’. Based on observations in several industries, Steven Shorrock presents ten traps that we can all fall into.
This article is a reproduction of the Editorial published in HindSight magazine issue 31 in December 2020…
Surprises in healthcare are common and can have lasting effects on clinicians. Steven Shorrock asked clinicians to reveal aspects of their experience with implications for learning.
This article is a reproduction of the Editorial published in HindSight magazine issue 34 in…
HindSight is a magazine on human and organisational factors in operations. HindSight magazine is free…
Reflections on what distinguishes the three zones of performance in the well-known graph associated with Safety-II.
In this post, I reflect on what I learned since graduating and have found to be most important to practice in the design and improvement of work.
All human activity, along with associated emergent problematic situations and opportunities, is embedded in context. The ‘context’ is, however, a a melange of different contexts. An approach that I have found useful is to spend time considering contextual influences (e.g., on decision making, at multiple levels of organisations) on problematic situations or potential solutions, more explicitly.
Humanistic Systems 