Cogs in machines
So many of us have fallen into the trap that human factors will be a game changer in safety critical industries. Let’s look at how Human factors is being applied in the maritime industry. I will take an example of an audit check at three levels (Technical, Process and Human Factors) on a ship. Audit […]
Risk management in the maritime industry
What is the ethic of risk management in the maritime industry?Pretending to be in control of risk through excess focus on paperwork. How is this achieved in practice?Prescriptive regulations are simplified and transferred to binary audit templates (Yes / No / ranking / grading). This simplistic design is convenient for the auditors to follow. It […]
Do you want your audiences to listen? Be yourself
Yesterday I had a chat with someone who attended my keynote in Copenhagen earlier in the week. He was keen to know why, even with 45 minutes in hand, I chose to put people in cognitive dissonance right from the start. Before I could say anything, he explained his own strategy. ‘I usually go slow, […]
On ethics and morals
“Human life was so cheap. It was the most expendable of all military equipment. A horse or a mule had much more consideration paid to it than a soldier.” Recollections of Lieutenant Ken GoodyearNewfoundland Regiment, 1950s This picture caught my attention at a Museum in St. John’s, NFL. It was how soldiers were viewed during […]
Your first (unconscious) reaction is your ethos
‘I think we may have collided with a fishing boat, but I have just checked from the bridge wing, and the boat seems upright so I think we should be OK to resume our voyage.’ This was a call from a ship captain to his manager in the middle of the night. The manager did […]
Never argue. If your aim is to help people unlearn and learn, tell them a story
There was once a Hummingbird that lived on a tree in a forest. One day the forest was on fire and as the fire approach the bird, all the animals shouted at the Hummingbird to get away from the tree. The Hummingbird refused to listen. ‘Ever since I was born, I have lived on this tree. […]
What’s wrong with Root Cause Analysis
A car skids while cornering at a certain point, turns turtle, and bursts into flames. From the car-driver’s point of view the cause of the accident was cornering too fast, and the lesson is that one must drive more carefully. From the county surveyor’s point of view, the cause was a defective road surface, and […]
Why methodology matters?
I have just returned from Canberra – a city built on the imagination of Marion Mahony Griffin. We will come back to this woman of genius but first let us focus on the power of her imagination from nearly a century ago. The term ‘Canberra’ comes from the Aboriginal word ‘Nganbra’ which means the ‘meeting […]