Ever looked back at an incident or accident to find the reason it happened and realised that you were stressed, tired or distracted and that is what caused the event? These are three of the ‘Dirty Dozen’ which human factors experts have identified as key contributory factors or precursors to incidents and accidents.
The term ‘The Dirty Dozen’ refers to twelve of the most common human error pre-conditions or precursors which lead to accidents and incidents. These twelve have been shown to influence people to make mistakes, errors or violations. The concept was developed by Gordon Dupont in 1993 and is now a key element to Human Factors in Maintenance training.
'Choices': Guaranteed small loss or a probable larger loss, injury or fatality?
You have been blown-out for 4 weekends in a row and you now have an opportunity to dive this weekend as the weather is fabulous and the visibility has been reported as 10m+. However, you aren’t due to dive for another four weeks for a variety of reasons. Just as you getting your gear ready to put on, you notice that you have a malfunction with your gear, something manageable but will cause you additional workload and reduce your margin of safety on the dive. This is a failure you wouldn’t normally accept because you get to dive lots. If you don’t dive, your buddy will have to sit out too as there isn’t anybody else to dive with them at such short notice. What do you do?
At this point, you are managing uncertainty not a risk because the numbers are not calculable. You decide to dive and nothing adverse happens and you have an awesome dive.
Are you reflective of your management of uncertainty? Did you think it was ‘good’?
Why ‘everyone is responsible for their own risk-based decisions’ isn’t the right approach to take to improve diving safety.
A diver qualified in the summer of 1999 while on holiday in Greece. His final dive on his PADI Open Water course was to 25m, obviously beyond the standards of this course. The instructor told him to write 18m in his logbook as they were only supposed to go to 18m. The diver didn’t know this during the dive so didn’t question the depth they dived to. Nor did they know that there was a way of providing feedback to the agency for breach of standards. In March 2005, the diver went to Cape Town with work and there was an opportunity to dive at Gansbaai so he took his OW card with him. He hadn’t dived since his OW course in 1999. There was no checking of cert cards when they got there, nor was there a skills dive to ensure everything was ok. The diver and 3 of his buddies completed a 45min 10m dive from a RHIB with no problems.
Cognitive Dissonance - Why you are right and I am wrong...Or are you?
Cognitive Dissonance has been defined as the psychological pain of accepting facts which are counter to our views which then prevents an open and rational cycle of improvement.
If you want to do something new which improves your safety or performance, how committed are you? If you see something shiny, how easy is it to buy that compared to making a change to your habits or behaviours? Which is likely to have a greater effect on your diving?
Three weeks ago I met Isabel, a business coach specialising in branding and marketing, with a view to working with her. She had been recommended to me as a coach who has the knack of pulling coherent ideas from the free-flowing discussions and coming up with a clear message regarding an offer, branding and identity.