It has certainly been a very eventful 6 months. Who would've thought as we saw in the New Year on 31st December 2019, that within three months we would be in a government instigated lockdown in a global effort to control the spread of a pandemic which was going to kill so many people? It's like a...

This phrase is often used to get people to pay attention to the hazards they face while undertaking a dive, especially a rebreather dive. If you don’t pay attention and make a mistake, then you are dead. The problem is that accidents don’t happen like this and as a consequence, we...

In the mid-1980s, there was a flight safety film produced which showed a Royal Air Force pilot walking out to his single-seat Jaguar fighter aircraft for a training sortie. He prepares the aircraft, starts it up and takes-off down the runway. Unfortunately, the aircraft has an engine failure...

Recently Teresa Swinton, the Founder and Owner of Paradigm Human Performance, gave a presentation to her neighbours in the Plymouth Science Park, Plymouth, UK, and titled it Managing Operational Performance During COVID-19. There are many gems and valuable nuggets in the...

What does safe mean to you? The dictionary defines safe as “protected from or not exposed to danger or risk; not likely to be harmed or lost” and in the context of many workplaces, we often think about the physical risks. These can include slips,...

Research conducted in 1989 by Deborah J. Mitchell, of the Wharton School; Jay Russo, of Cornell; and Nancy Pennington, of the University of Colorado, found that prospective hindsight—imagining that an event has already occurred—increases the ability to correctly identify reasons for...

Many of our readers will have heard about Professor James Reason's Swiss Cheese Model and how it can be used to show how incidents are developed because of holes in the barriers and defences which are put in place to maximise safety.

Professor Reason's research showed that at different levels...

Recently at a course, there was a very interesting debate, which challenged the basic premise of human performance and whether there was any such thing as “Human Error”. The traditional view is of course, that we can predict failure rates of technical systems, if we know the component...

Human Error…  Often talked about, written about, and used to close out accident and incident investigations.  What is meant by human error?  I have learned over the past few days that my perception contrasts to that used by others working in the safety field, and I wanted to...