When it comes to human performance, most efforts to understand work are dedicated to operational roles such as air traffic controllers and professional pilots. In this article, I outline five challenges for engineers in the drive for digitalisation.
Tag: safety
‘Human Factors’ (or Ergonomics) is often presented as something that it’s not, or as something…
In this short series, I highlight seven foes and seven friends of system safety, both for explanation and intervention. Each is a concept, meme, or device used in thinking, language, and intervention (reinforced by more fundamental foes that act as barriers to thinking). They are not the only foes or friends, of course, but they are significant ones that either crop up regularly in discussions and writings about safety, or else – in the case of friends – should do.
In this post, I outline seven foes of intervention.
In this short series, I will highlight seven foes and seven friends of system safety, both for explanation and intervention. Each is a concept, meme, or device used in thinking, language, and intervention (reinforced by more fundamental foes that act as barriers to thinking). They are not the only foes or friends, of course, but they are significant ones that either crop up regularly in discussions and writings about safety, or else – in the case of friends – should do.
Learning Teams, Learning from Communities
In this article, I refer to some of the ideas and writings of asset-based community development to reflect on Learning Teams in health and safety, and small group conversations and action more generally in organisations. I highlight four lessons from ABCD for learning teams and host organisations.
Two or three years ago, I undertook a course involving UX ‘certification’. I had already…
Safety-II has become a talking point. It is discussed not only among safety professionals, but – perhaps more importantly – among front line practitioners, managers, board members and regulators in a wide array of industries. But what is the real focus of Safety-II?
Most organisations seem to use a classification system (or taxonomy) of some sort, for instance for safety classification, and much time is spent developing and using such taxonomies. Importantly, decisions may be made on the basis of the taxonomy and associated database outputs (or it may be that much time is spent on development and use, but little happens as a result). There is therefore a risk of time and money spent unnecessarily, with associated opportunity costs. Still, taxonomies are a requirement in all sorts of areas, and several things should be kept in mind when designing and evaluating a taxonomy. This posts introduces twelve properties of effective classification systems.
A legendary rivalry: one mountain and two climbers seeking to be the best. We join…
A few weeks ago, I had a chat with Jamey Hampton, Jessica Kerr, John K. Sawers of Greater…
Humanistic Systems 