A Surgeon’s Take on Human and Organisational Factors: A Conversation with Manoj Kumar

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.

Bonding and Bridging at the Philosophical Breakfast Club

On 26 April 2018, I presented at the ‘Philosophical Breakfast Club’ (@philosophicalBC) conference on High Performing Teams (#PBCHPT2018). It was a remarkable conference bringing together healthcare professionals, psychologists, sports scientists, athletes, managers, human factors/ergonomics specialists, military officers and specialists, and others, My first conversation while having tea before the conference was with a spinal surgeon and bomb disposal expert. Throughout the conference I had many other fascinating conversations with people from a diverse range of backgrounds.

This leads me to the focus of my talk: collaboration at the interfaces, and what happens between teams, groups, professions, layers of management, organisations…  In this post, I summarise the talk, slide by slide, with tweet-sized explanations.

Learning from Communities: A Conversation with Cormac Russell

The study of communities and community-building activities can provide important insights into collaboration within and between organisations. Over the last 21 years Cormac Russell has worked in 35 countries, with communities, agencies, non-governmental organisations and governments. This post includes the podcast and transcript of a conversation between Cormac Russell and me, about learning from communities.