On this episode of the Salience Podcast, we turn our attention to the relationship between human factors, systems, and analysis of safety incidents and accidents. As you might imagine, a company with a name like Frontline Mind is intimately involved with frontline action. The agencies and people we specialize in work in fast-paced, complex, and at times high-risk environments. Inevitably, there are near misses, incidents and accidents. 

How we best learn from these is not straightforward. In fact, when we work with agencies for the first time, we find that most after-action reviews or operational or cold debriefs have made matters worse. Partly, this is because there is an unrealistic focus on events that emerge and are only visible in hindsight. This is partly because there is a strong focus on errors and what went wrong. We can see and hear this bias in a deficit-based language where there is a focus on what went wrong. Now, I'm not a fan of an exclusive focus on what went well either. The danger of overdone positivity or staying in happy, clappy land is also unhelpful and is just as much of a concern as an obsession with what went wrong. So it's this use of language and the way we can direct attention that we are going to focus on today. And to help us unpack, how we can learn from near misses, incidents and accidents without falling into a judgmental binary of good and bad. 

we are joined by Dr. Steven Shorrock from Eurocontrol, where he works to support aviation throughout Europe with human factors, applied psychology and systems thinking and practice. Steven is a chartered psychologist and human factor specialist. He is editor in-chief of Hindsight Magazine and adjunct associate professor at the University of the Sunshine Coast Center for Human Factors and Sociotechnical Systems.

For more information about The Salience Podcast and Frontline Mind please visit our website at https://www.frontlinemind.com/the-salience-podcast/ You can also sign up for our newsletter here https://frontlinemind.us17.list-manage.com/subscribe?u=ff181d12c77d7cea5f19a2c48&id=fd7357f614