Thread by @DrPaulSalmon

Lots of people asking me to provide a summary of yesterdays Wigglesworth Memorial Lecture. In the lecture I discussed 10 lessons that I have learned about Occupational Health and Safety (OHS) through 20 years of applied #humanfactors research. Here they are!

Lesson 1. A human error lens is useless and can be dangerous. I talked here about how using the term in OHS can be misleading and prevent learning. Errors are a consequence of systemic issues, not a cause of anything!

Lesson 2. All accidents/safety compromising incidents are caused by multiple interacting contributory factors. There is no such thing as a root cause

Lesson 3. Our current research is suggesting that there may be a generic causal network that appears frequently in accidents/incidents regardless of domain. Also talked here about how minor incidents have similar causal patterns to major incidents #safety #causation

Lesson 4. Most of the risk and safety management methods used in practice are out of date (and some are not fit for purpose). I talked here about the research practice gap and how state of the art methods are not common in practice #systemsthinking

Lesson 5. 'Emergent' risks are elusive and the ones that generally catch organisations out. There is a need in risk assessment to consider emergent risks - those risks that arise when risks across the broader system interact with one another to create new risks #NetHARMS

Lesson 6. Accident/incident contributory factors are not always failures. I talked here about how our research is showing clearly the causal role of 'normal performance' in accidents and incidents.

Lesson 7. Automation is not the silver bullet for OHS. I talked here about Bainbridge's Ironies of #Automation and unruly technologies. Don't be tempted to think automation will enhance safety. In fact inserting it will increase complexity and create a raft of new issues

Lesson 8. There are key leverage points (see Meadows work) that can be used to drive improvements in safety (and performance generally). Another way of saying that 'fixing broken components' won't solve anything (see Dekker's work) #leverage

Lesson 9. Human's are the glue that hold badly designed and degraded work systems together. A key point here is it is important for OHS practitioners to study how this works ('what went right') just as passionately as they study what went wrong.

Lesson 10. Critical for OHS management is the use of an integrated framework of methods for risk assessment, incident reporting & accident analysis. Using disconnected/distinct methods is problematic as the outputs of one method cannot be used to inform applications of the other

To close, I was extremely honoured and humbled to be asked to give the Wigglesworth Memorial Lecture and hope that people enjoyed it and that it stirred up some discussion in OHS circles @HFandSTS @usceduau @AIHS_OHS #safety #risk #systemsthinking #humanfactors