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Real leaders leave a legacy. They capture the hearts and minds of their teams. Their origin story puts the safety and well-being of their people first. Great companies ubiquitously have safe, yet productive operations. For those companies, safety is an investment, not a cost for the C-suite. It’s a real topic of daily focus. This is the Safety Guru with your host, Eric Michrowski, a globally recognized ops and safety guru, public speaker and author. Are you ready to leave a safety legacy? Your legacy success story begins now.

Hi, and welcome to the Safety Guru. Today, I’m very excited to have with me Captain Ian Hollingworth. He’s a former fighter pilot as well as a commercial pilot with a lot of experience flying but also brings a lot of expertise in human factors. Ian, welcome to the show. Very excited to have you with me.

It’s great to be here. Thanks very much indeed. I’m looking forward to it as It should be a lot of fun.

Excellent. Let’s start with your background in aviation and safety. You’ve crossed analog last flight decks. We’ll get into all of that very soon. But tell me a little bit about your background and how you got into human factors.

Well, done. You’ve already introduced me as the former fighter pilot and commercial airline captain. Well, for over 40 years, Eric, it’s been a privilege to be involved in aviation as an instructor examiner on the airplane types themselves, which vary from 1980s times in the UK Royal Air Force, flying the lightning, which is akin to the F-104-star fires It’s that generation of airplane. I was firstly flying those as an instructor, very much during the Cold War in the 1980s, which turned out to be quite hot from time to time. It was not cold at all, really. Then Once I’d done that for 12 years or so, and in the meantime, moved on from being a single fellow to being married with kids, I did the hop, which is not unusual to commercial types. I then joined commercial aviation, initially flying the very early 747 model, 747 Jumbos, the one and 200 series, very early analog aeroplanes as well. That was quite comfortable for me, and I had introduction through flight engineers, et cetera, et cetera. Through to more modern types, you might say, through to the 737, where I attained my first command, more models of that, back onto the jumbo as a captain and as a trainer, and then more laterally as a trainer on the Boeing 777 and the 787.

Most of my time, almost all my time has been with Boeing as well as my time in the UK Air Force. How I got into the safety side of things? Well, right now, my business, Cassandra Flight Training in UK and Plainetalks.com, really consult to aviation and non-aviation industry, but principally safety critical organizations such as nuclear, health care, and fire and rescue services here in the UK. Sometimes I work through associate companies as well. It’s great to cross-pollinate and work with other teams. This takes me to all parts of the globe from time to time. More recently, it’s been Africa, the Indian subcontinent, and generally throughout Europe. I do what I’m not doing now. I don’t tend to do a lot of talking. I tend to do much more listening in this environment and facilitate and craft a discussion, generally using case studies, really to get inside the heads of those operators that had been involved in incidents and accidents to work out what was really so compelling and was right about what they were doing that led them to the accidents. That’s it. How I arrived here, to a certain extent, Eric, is still a bit of a mystery to me.

But I was a child of the ’60s and ’70s, and I very much was building those plastic models when I was a kid, throwing them out the window and following the likes of the Gemini and Apollo programs for NASA. I watched the development of Concord. I sat there, my I had at three o’clock in the morning with a black and white TV watching Neil Armstrong land on the moon. How could I not be inspired to go into aviation or other? It wasn’t with any great plan, Eric, at all. I got out of university, really, as the world’s worst physics graduate. But all I wanted to do was to do my best within aviation, which was to fly the most exciting airplanes available that signed to me in the Air Force, which is the Harrier and the Lightning. As far as the safety element of that question goes, I like to aviation, I’ve always been interested in the background as to what makes a complex system work so well. But it’s when safety becomes personal that your mindset develops as it does.

When I look back to the frequent accidents that occurred in and around me in my time on the lightning in particular, the second time I flew the airplane as a single-seat fighter, I had a catastrophic engine failure myself. Oh, my goodness.

No big deal because it had two big engines, and the other one was quite capable of getting me back on the ground again. It was a case of, pick up another airplane, go with it. But we had several accidents which involved the loss of airplane ejection, and also from time to time, the loss of the pilot as well, which really hurt, particularly when it’s your friend. In ’88, in particular, my very best friend at the time was killed in a Red Arrows accident. When we think of the red arrows as a team of excellence, really, akin to other great aviation teams. It was a massive shock to me. But the results of that accident inquiry, essentially, the word pilot error. But there was much, much more involved in that accident from a systemic that really concentrated my mind, I would say. The loss of a friend in the 1985 Manchester 737 accident, a commercial accident, Papa 2 8 Mike, was my wife’s best friend, in fact, my wife’s best friend, really does offer you more in terms of understanding aviation safety. And that’s it, really. But my first formal exposure to CRM, as such, on joining British Airways.

I think I’d always been involved in airmanship, as it was told. Sure. It was. But joining BA, and thereafter much more deeply and enjoyably working with a guy called nick Dahlstrom at Emirates Airlines, probably about 20 years ago now. So that’s me. That’s my general background in aviation and safety.

I’d love to explore in terms of how decision-making has shifted in the aviation world. You alluded to analog versus glass-flight decks and shifting from one to the other, from the older generations of 47, 100 as an example, to more modern to 787. Tell me a little bit more in terms of how decision-making has evolved over time.

Sure. You’re absolutely right. In my case, I’ve been exposed to a lot of analog type airplanes and those systems all the way through to really sophisticated airplanes, glass carpets, et cetera, and digital stuff. Also, operating with basically a single pilot, but within a team, if you like, all the way through to multi-cruise on big airplanes. It’s worth looking at what is still the same, if you like. We still work to a checklist. It’s a checklist environment. We still adhere to standard operating procedures, either in the military or outside. The decisions that we make as a human being are still essentially the quick ones, the experiential ones, the recognition prime ones. If I go back to my engine failure on my second flight on the light, it went bang. I knew what it was. You could instantly recognize that and had to deal with it through a checklist which you practiced, all the way through to the more considered or rule or procedural bound decisions that we run to in more complex systems. So, type one, type two, fast and slow. But the big difference now is the complexity of circumstance. It’s sifting through the large amount of data that’s available to to the operator or to the pilot, and to be able to prioritize exactly what you’re going to do and how you move forward.

Sometimes, I try to offer an analogy to that with the teams that I’m working with. It’s like if you’ve got a deck of cards and the 52 cards in the pack, and each card offers a solution or a part solution or a way forward. Sometimes those cards can be in a pack in your hand, all folded up. Or you can have the same 52 cards all spread out on the table, and you can have a whole group of people having a big discussion about which card you pick up first and why and how it’s going to work. It all depends upon the time that you’ve got. And quite often in aviation, time is limited, or the perception of time is limited. So, you can pick cards up in your hand and you can pick a card up, that doesn’t work. Pick another one up, that doesn’t work. Pick a third card up. That keeps me safe and that allows me time to make another decision. And that’s a way of thinking about decision making. But within this, we’re still the same human being, and the system will become much more complicated and much more complex.

But we’re the same. We haven’t evolved particularly well. We have to manage our time. We’re still subject to the same time constraints, and it is crucial to understand how much time is perceived to be available in order to get these decisions made. So, one of my struck lines, Eric, is trying to simplify solutions to complex problems. And when you have a complex problem, a complex non-normal, let’s say, on an airplane, begin with just starting the clock. Always, always start the clock because the time will run away with you otherwise. Then quite quickly, I think it’s like going back to Apollo 13 and missions that can quickly go so badly wrong. You have to ascertain your bottom lines very quickly. What are the non-negotiables? And work on from there. Once you’ve got the clock running, once you understand how much time you got, once your bottom line’s ascertained, then you can work simply from there. One of the great things that’s worked in the evolution of CRM is the evolution of decision-making models. You may have heard the acronyms FWDEC, DODAR, T DODAR, grade, they’re all doing the same things. They all offer you a framework to build a decision.

So DODAR, for instance, which is well used within aviation, first off, once the time is sorted out, then you spend time in diagnosis of a problem, and the time is rarely wasted diagnosing a problem. Coming up with options, so D and then O, options and risk, how we’re going to categorize risk, decide what you’re going to do, assign the tasks, and then review. So, you’re going through a well-founded circular pattern to go back into your original diagnosis to make sure that what you thought was the problem was actually the problem and that you’re not trying to offer a solution to a problem that isn’t there. In a way, how has decision making shifted? It’s become more sophisticated, and it’s cognizant to the fact that the human being has to be able to break down that complexity of circumstance into a simplified form. Within that, then we can learn how to brief a circumstance and debrief a circumstance and learn from that effectively.

Sometimes you’ve got very short periods of time. We’ll talk about some of the lessons from aviation. Air frost comes to mind in one of those cases to diagnose a problem when autopilot kicks Tell me a little bit about some of the key takeaways in terms of what are really the key essence of human factors and maybe bring some stories and some examples from aviation.

Well, the problem-solving decision making that you’ve just talked about is central to the 9 or 10, let’s say, assessment markers that we use for pilot competencies nowadays in a era. Those pilot competencies are way beyond just the technical ones that that were experiential for me in the 1970s and ’80s, where it was stick and rudder and you were learning to fly the airplane, hand-eye coordination. Really, it now evolves much more into the social skills of leadership, communication, teamwork, et cetera. But the stuff that I work around with is the cognitive factors, the thinking things of the problem solving and how that manifestness itself in terms your workload management, your situational awareness, and your threat and error management understanding. So, the essentials of human factors, as you say, spin out from that. And I’m not going to list them all, but the few that are important to me here, if you like, and some of the others are available. As I’ve said, effective communication really is a skill set that runs through everything that we do in terms of normal and normal operations. Effective communication is much more than what it just says on the 10, if you like.

To have a true understanding, you need to be able to obviously convey information clearly accurately and timely within aviation. But as a crew, you need to be both concise and interactive, and that’s quite difficult to achieve sometimes. Normal communication, generally from one person to the next involves talking effectively to pair of eyes and using body language, which sometimes is mitigated, again, on the flight deck. But it’s, again, the use of the spoken word, again, which is high upon the list of communication within aviation in a way that you’re using both open and closed questions and limiting those questions appropriate to a circumstance. So, Communication runs through everything in human factors. But if I just pick out some other bits and pieces from that. Let’s look at assertiveness, for instance, which in the West of the world, UK in particular, we’re very good at not being very clear. We use mitigating speech the whole time. We playthings down when really in a safety critical environment, you have to be, at all times, clear and concise and well-paced in your delivery and understand that your delivery is only appropriate to the receiver. Can the receiver take that information and understand it?

The package needs to be delivered clearly, objectively, and non-aggressively. So, all those things come up. We see a lot of case studies, a lot of accidents and incidents, whereby people knew what was going on, but they just didn’t communicate that clearly enough to be understood.

Great.

If I might just bring in three other elements that are essential to me. Five things, if you like, that are essential to me in terms of human factors. First of all is threat and error management, which is part of the latest iteration, if you like, of human factors CRM. It’s understanding what the threats in your business, both obvious and not so obvious, the later ones, and how to manage those, and spending most of your time avoiding situations. The anecdote, the one that I learned when I was a kid learning to fly was that superior pilots should avoid situations that might require the use of their superior skills. So, you’re spending your time avoiding threats and managing them rather than working hard to obviate the results or to mitigate the issues. The other two that I build in are absolutely essential, and all these things dovetail. Situational awareness, and I think awareness is a bit of a misnomer. Situational awareness means the perception of a circumstance, your comprehension or understanding of it, and then projection of that understanding into the future. So, you can really work out what you think is going to happen next, five minutes down the line, 30 minutes down the line.

Clearly, if you’re operating transatlantic on a big airplane, what happens? Do they get sick? Where do I divert to? What is the weather, et cetera? That’s your situational awareness. And then is resilience, because there are so many times when you get hit by a problem, and then another, and then another, and then another, that those things for me, communication, assertiveness, threats, and management of your circumstance and the resilience are really important. What I would say is, how does it go wrong? More often than not, we talk about loss of situational awareness rather than trying to regain situational awareness. I had an issue. Well, very early on, I was quite a competent fighter pilot, so mid-1960s in the Cold War, and I was scrambling for what’s called a QRA sortie, which is quick to reaction alert. You’re fully armed. Basically, you’re the policeman of the skies, in my case, around the United Kingdom. I was scrambling at night in the most awful conditions and scrambling from slumber, from bed. But if I take that flight forward about three or four hours, I was fulfilling mission, which was to interrogate the outside of an airplane, which was a Russian airplane, a Russian four-engine bomber, a bear foxtrot, way out over northern Scotland, going out into the Atlantic.

I was taking photographs for intelligence purposes, obviously. But I was very quickly way beyond the capabilities of where the airplane should be. I was flying in an airplane that never carried enough fuel. It burnt whatever fuel it had very, very quickly indeed. You needed air tanker support to get the job done. I stuck myself on a limb and I wanted to get this job done. It was very much a can-do scenario. I had a cockpit fire. I was underneath this airplane, pretty close to this Russian guy, taking photographs of aerials and stuff like that. In those days, you flew the airplane with the control column between your knees because you had a handheld camera. There I am in a squashed-up airplane. That was away from anywhere. Those airplanes were rudimentary. There’s no GPS. There was no initial navigation system, no nothing. It was all to do with mental dead reckoning, how far you’ve been traveling for how long at what speed in what direction. You work out where you would go. When I was on my own, I’d left the tanker a long, long, long way back in order to intercept these guys. So, when I had the cockpit fire, all of a sudden, my mindset turned from a QRA, operational intelligence gathering scenario to, one, a survival Am I going to burn?

Am I going to fire the canopy off and freeze to death? Or am I eventually going to have to eject from this airplane into a sea and never be seen again? And my mindset turned completely. So, how did it go wrong in terms of human factors? And where did it start? I’ve asked myself those questions so many times because I clearly did not think through positively enough about what could happen, how things could possibly go wrong. And at that time, because you’re then in a circumstance with a radar that basically was on fire. It was only about half a meter away from my face. Do I have the cognitive capacity to update myself under those circumstances particularly well? Had I thought this through? No, I hadn’t. And I was in a right old mess, a right old pickle. And I was quite fine, Eric. I really was. But then I had to disengage from that operation and find my tanker, again, just using mental maths. We’re at four o’clock in the morning in a hazy early morning sky north of Scotland in May, trying to find some contrail of what I hope was a tanker and to be able to have him intercept me because I was very short of fuel to grab to get home.

I needed to get the fuel in order to make some landfall back in the UK, maybe more fuel, keep the fire down to be able to land back at pace. It was one thing after another. But I really messed up that day. But It was a great case study for me to reflect on how I got it completely wrong and how fortunate I was in the end to be able to bring the airplane back, along with some pictures for intelligence reasons. And there we go. That’s one of a number of personal studies, and I kidnaped Eric. There are lightning pilots out there that’ve got much better stories than that and many more of them because that was the nature of the operation.

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It gets to what you were mentioning before around making it personal as well, that safety is personal in a circumstance like this from a learning standpoint.

I was a complete rookie. I didn’t think I was. I was a second tourist. Most accidents and incidents happened to people that were the most experienced guys on the squadron. They were tasked with the more difficult scenarios. Sometimes it was the can-do attitude. You were good enough. You were fully operational. You could do all these things, but sometimes you stuck your neck out far too far. That’s what I did on this occasion. But it got me thinking about myself, my self-awareness in terms of my capabilities or lack of in this case. Then as I went into commercial aviation a little later on, you’ve asked me about things like Tenerife and Air France 447. What are those things bringing? Clearly, anybody that knows about this this circumstance and have analyzed those accidents in considerable detail. But I try to look at accidents with colleagues through different eyes, really, and go beyond the accident report. For instance, if you look at the Tenerife accident and essentially, the KLM captain, Jacob van Zante, was a very senior training captain within- Very senior. Yeah. That accident was caused by a whole bunch of circumstances. The American side doesn’t quite agree with the KLM side, the Dutch side.

But essentially, the captain’s mindset was very much can do on that day. You have to try to work out why was that? Is that just his personality, or can we shift that behavior? Okay, he was very, very clear about what he wanted to do. And we had perhaps a less than assertive crew copilot within there. But the mindset of that captain was probably driven as much as anything else by the fact you spend a lot of time in the simulator. When you’re training in the simulator, Eric, you can utilize the four hours that’s in there as best you possibly can as a trainer. We don’t spend a lot of time, as you would do in real-time circumstances, taxiing around as they were in Tener Reef, you can reposition the simulator instantly to another point, debrief, even brief for another approach. You If you can reposition the airplane in the sky or on the ground. But if you’re minded like that, that you can do stuff and circumvent time to a certain extent, I can understand where Captain Van Zante just wanted to get this this airplane, airborne as quickly as to get to these destination within time, within the flight time limitations for the rest of the crew and so on and so forth and make that commercial viable.

There’s a lot of things that go in there. Into the mix that are not just the obvious. Sure. And there we go. So poor outcomes from that. Similarly, the Air France 447, 20 years later, June 2009, we come up with now a very sophisticated airplane of Petro Cube icing, which compromises a highly complex system, not necessarily easily recognized by the crew. Then if they’re not trained in dealing with that in this circumstance, then what’s the outcome going to be? It’s generally going to be less than ideal. Finding those positive outcomes, the great stories, there’s less outcome. But clearly, in ’89, for those people that want to research this is a really interesting one is United 2: 32 that landed at Sioux City, which the headline is, Eric. It was survivability from a non-survivable accident. How did that happen? By to have great communication and quality CRM in action from the very early days of a formal CRM being taught, a superb Al Haynes-led incident from which we learn a huge amount from as well. There we go. I’ve rambled on for a bit, haven’t I? Essentially, human factors.

Human factors, yes.

It’s the case studies that are important. It’s not somebody like we’re talking about. Absolutely. It’s the case studies that always surprise, and it’s the case studies that are really interesting.

You mentioned the word CRM. For anybody in aviation, that’s a very common word. Tell me a little bit more in terms of for somebody who may be outside of the aviation industry, what is CRM and how has it really evolved? Because it’s a very key component to a lot of the progress that’s been made in safety in aviation.

Perfect. Well, put indeed. I mean, the definition is out there, and it’s what it says, really. It’s utilizing all resources, human and others, other human beings, the technical side of stuff, in order to get the best and the safest outcome from any circumstance that you might find yourself in. That is essentially it. How has it evolved within aviation? Aviation has obviously been the background to CRM. My first understanding of CRM which is crew resource management, was actually cockpit resource management. Let’s say the late 1980s, evolving from NASA studies and high-profile accidents all the way from late ’60s, ’70s, it became cockpit resource management, meaning captain resource management, to start off with, understanding how the captain led a team and stuff. Then recognizing that it was more than just one man or one lady. It was to do with a crew and a team and all those elements that go into a safe operation. It then started to evolve, and there are a number of iterations of which we’re now looking at the sixth and generating the seventh. But it involves understanding the fact that error is a human issue. Error is out there. We’re never going to change the fact that the human being creates errors all the time.

So, it was trying to mitigate errors and then understanding that errors actually are generally systemic, understanding that they’re part of a system and a procedure. Right now, we’ve got evolution of CRM with the sixth iteration, which is threat and error management right at its core. But it’s also evolving along with the technology. It’s evolving along with the training systems. And now we’re into We’re learning systems that mirror exactly what the needs of the system are. It’s competency-based training, not learning to do just one thing, deal with an engine failure on takeoff. But it’s enhancing all the skills are softer skills, that allow us to take those skills in a translational way into any circumstance. The evolution considers the early analog structures, the training systems that reflected the fact that machines initially were unreliable and could be regarded as dangerous, through to So the more modern stuff, which innovations, GPS, performance tools, digitalization, super reliability. But constantly, we’re trying to align human capability with a level of the tech system that’s there at the time and what we do best. So, producing super reliability probably reduces human resilience because we’re not exposed to the same stuff as we were, thankfully, 30, 40 years ago.

It’s trying to make sure that we, as human beings, still do the stuff that we’re best at, which is decision making and allowing the system to do what it does best, which with highly complex systems is generally monitoring the systems themselves and data analysis. It’s constantly on the move. We need to perceive the erosion, if you like, of traditional pilot skills. We still need to have manual handling skills. We still need to have this situational awareness. It’s marrying all those things together. We now have a very complex understanding of training systems and how we manage training systems within the sphere of CRM, which leads to things like evolving cultures and just cultures, where we can really learn, and business can learn from aviation.

I think that’s a good segue in terms of how do these principles we talked about from human factors to CRM, to some of the elements around decision making, more complex systems, how can this translate into other industries? A lot of the work you mentioned that you do now is in other industries that are also high risk or require high reliability in bringing some of these principles from aviation to them.

That’s a fantastic question. The learnings for industry are so many. We just talked about just culture, and I don’t know whether an understanding of a true just culture needs to be probably defined first. Trust, which is a proactive and generative culture. Trust and transparency need to be there and accountability. It promotes learning from mistakes, effectively, to understand that we’re distinguishing between the good behaviors and the bad behaviors, aiming to create the ideal environment to support a good organization. In terms of particularly industry, which industry is the safety critical stuff? First, you have to ask from a high level whether that particular business has the moral courage and vision to move forward with this and have the passion for a possible reset of an organization if things are not going quite so well. That is a big buy-in to start off with, courage and vision. But because you’re going to be looking at organizational performance from the top down, from the philosophies driven by management all the way through to the procedures and practices, in my case. Sure. There are some big questions to be asked first before you embark on this, but the consequences, the positives are myriad and absolutely fantastic, if you can embrace it.

When I work with, for instance, work with nuclear power for the first time, and I was working predominantly with nuclear reactor control room staff and how they were assessed in role. Basically, in the UK, at the time, there were eight nuclear power stations. All of them were different because there were all sorts of prototypes. The systems were different, and the people involved in running the control systems had been in place for 20, 25 years, so lots of legacy items going on. How do we learn from aviation in terms of managing this and keeping the system safe? Well, first of all, it doesn’t start with the sharp and the interactive control room staff. You have to pay close attention to effectively the organizational blunt end of your operation and understand that within your system, error is the human precondition to start off with. But if you got frequent error in any of those systems or any of the way in which people work, it It’s really a system of a less ideal circumstance within the system. And then understanding. The third thing I would say is understanding the levels of accountability and trust that are placed within those people within your team, those safety critical members.

Once you’ve done that, so you analyze what you’re doing, then you can find, and this is the crucial bit, you need to find the stuff within your system that is latent, is unsafe, that nobody knows about, because that’s the stuff that’s going to cause harm in the end. It’s not the accidents and the incidents that we that we analyze. It’s the stuff that’s been in there for years and years. It’s built into the system. You can do that by, again, using your people. You need to embrace a dynamic and facilitative series of discussion and learn how to brief and debrief efficiently and giving people the opportunity to do that by setting up, for instance, human factors CRM sessions in a company, let’s say, a nuclear or an aviation or a maritime company that involves initial CRM. Everybody gets to know the culture of the company. Then you revisit that on an annual basis or semi-annual basis and refresh it all the time by having these discussions. And within that, you can then explore and analyze your industry case studies or your personal case studies within the business and encourage people to be imaginative and creative in their thought.

And this is quite fun, actually. It does cost a little bit of money, but it’s a great exercise to get people actively involved in understanding the culture of their business. From there, stuff drops out. People begin to find those latent threats and make them less latent, more observable. You can then start to properly explore strategies that develop the resilience in your business, both individual and systemic, to continue, to obviously make you a safer and more effective entity. You’re going well beyond regulatory compliance or a need to know this, and you need to have serious, from a business perspective, outcome-based conversation, what you want out of this rather than how much is it going to cost.

Right. In How do you surface, you touched a little bit on it in terms of some of those lean conditions, because that’s a key element in terms of really addressing some of the system factors.

You talked about some training, but there’s also workshops conversations. Tell me a little bit more in terms of what that looks like, if you can. The workshops that I run generally work from an organizational perspective. If you got, let’s say, between 6 and 12 people in a room, and it’s a classroom environment. This is not something that’s technically difficult to achieve. It is a real privilege to be involved in these circumstances where you are utterly comfortable in saying what you need to say and feel without feeling of compromise or of blame. This is who doesn’t just culture. And generally, within a simple environment, cup of coffee, classroom, whiteboards, flip charts, not doing everybody’s death with PowerPoint, a management video, but straightforward, having an understanding, find Fred, the guy who is really critical to your organization. It might not be the CEO in the business that’s most critical to your organization and the way in which it works. It’s somebody further down the peaking order. So, this is a bottom-up circumstance where everybody is getting to understand the culture of the business. And from time to time, you were involved in a circumstance happened a couple of weeks ago where I was in a classroom week with some guys from Air Baltic, from Latvia, smart airlines, smart people, seven or eight training captains.

We talked for a week about how we can improve various circumstances within the business, training systems in particular. It was a complete joy. Once everybody got to know one another, we’d introduce one another and each other’s background. We then get into the anecdotes, the case studies. Those are the things that people learn from area. It’s the personal stuff, and it has to be entirely relevant to what they’re doing and how they see themselves. Quite often, it’s a journey of self-knowledge, to be quite honest, understanding where you fit in the system, but being assertive enough and comfortable enough within the system to be able to deliver whatever material it is that feeds back into the system. And feedback is absolutely critical. And that’s all that we’re trying to do. And I facilitate that as best I can. I don’t talk through it. I allow people to talk and spend a lot of time listening and try to work out cognitively, sometimes paraphrase what people have said, but try to work out cognitively what this actually means within the business. James Reason, and you may have heard of Professor James Reason, sadly, he passed away earlier on this month.

He was one of the greatest giants of human factors. I don’t know whether you know he passed away. I didn’t. No. He was so instrumental in the way in which human factors work, both in aviation and outside aviation. He’s famous for the Swiss cheese model. Yeah? Yeah. Great. Yeah. He’s in recognition for the Swiss cheese model. Most people know about Swiss cheese. I won’t go into that. But He said that the operator in accidents is operating but adding the final garnish to a lethal stew whose ingredients have already been. Right. With that, a phrase that sticks with me at the end of every day and before I go to work is having, as he said, a sense of chronic unease about what you do. If you can teach your staff in a safety critical environment that. When I mean chronic unease, it’s not being scared about what’s happening. It’s just knowing about what ifs are going to happen today, how my day is going to finish. Everybody that’s crashed an airplane that’s had a problem at sea didn’t think that the day was going to end up with their demand. It’s always thinking about the what ifs in the future.

Chronic on ease will keep you safe within your system, if you can say that your system is about safety and more, and it’s about what we do, and that is a strapped line that works, then it’s good enough for me. It’s The lesson is learned.

That’s it. There we go. That’s it. I think that’s a key piece, this element of chronic unease. It’s almost a healthy form of paranoia of being prepared for what could happen, as opposed to what I often see in key industries is an overconfidence of, I know my craft, I know what I’m doing.

You’re absolutely right. You have to take into fact that the skill of the craft, if you’re a director control room team supervisor, is essentially what it’s all about. But I really enjoy the cross-pollination of taking circumstance from aviation into, let’s say, nuclear industry. To have these open discussions, it’s a really healthy place to be. Similarly with the healthcare scenarios, nobody knows everything. The more I’m around, the less I feel that I know. That’s a very good analogy.

So, Ian, thank you very much for joining me today and for sharing some of the key elements around human factors, CRM, but also the applicability in other industries. If somebody wants to get in touch with you, what’s the best way to do that? In many ways.

You can find me on LinkedIn, on YouTube. My Gmail address, which is simple, [email protected] It will almost get me there. I’m quite happy to pick up anything at any time, and I’ll always respond. That’s it. Excellent. Well, thank you so much for joining me today.

It’s been a great pleasure, Eric.

Thanks a lot for the invitation.

I appreciate it. Absolutely. Thank you.

Thank you for listening to The Safety Guru on C-suite Radio. Leave a legacy. Distinguish yourself from the past. Grow your success. Capture the hearts and minds of your teams. Elevate your safety. Like every successful athlete, top leaders continuously invest in their safety leadership with an expert coach to boost safety performance. Begin your journey at execsafetycoach.com. Come back in two weeks for the next episode with your host, Eric Michrowski. This podcast is powered by Propulo Consulting.