The third age of human factors: From independence to interdependence

International audienceSince its beginning in the mid 1940s, human factors has tried to keep up with the ever increasing demands from technological and societal developments. Looking back, the development of human factors can be described as corresponding to three ages. In the first age, humans were seen as too too imprecise, variable, and slow to allow the full use of the technological potential. In the second age, humans were seen as failure prone and unreliable, hence a challenge to system safety. In both ages, the human was treated as an entity, as a part that could be described independently of the whole. In the third age, humans are recognised as being necessary if work systems are to be safe and productive. Human performance variability is accepted as the necessary basis for effectively coping with the complexity of the work situations and system performance is understood as the non-trivial result of interdependent parts

"Safe in an unsafe world: Bringing Safety-II into practice"

The sustained existence of modern societies depends on the safe and efficient functioning of multiple systems, functions, and specialised services. Because these often are tightly coupled, safety cannot be managed simply by responding whenever something goes wrong. Both theory and practice make clear that safety management that follows developments rather than leads them runs a significant risk of lagging behind and of becoming reduced to uncoordinated and fragmentary fire-fighting. (The same, of course, goes for the management of quality and productivity.) In order to prevent this from happening, safety management must look ahead, not only to avoid that things go wrong but also – and more importantly – to ensure that they go right.1 Proactive safety management must focus on how everyday performance usually goes well rather than on why it occasionally fails, and must actively try to improve the former rather than simply prevent the latter.Universidad de Málaga. Campus de Excelencia Internacional Andalucía Tech

From protection to resilience: Changing views on how to achieve safety

International audienceEffective safety management requires the ability to learn from the past and to anticipate the future. Yet what we can learn from the past (i.e., accident investigation) and what we can imagine for the future (i.e., risk assessment) depends critically on how we think about it, i.e., the models and methods we have at our disposal. Accident investigations have long been dominated by a search for causes, either as root causes or human errors. Risk assessment has similarly been dominated by static representations such as event and fault trees. In both cases the commonly used models and methods have reached their limits because the reality of our self-created socio-technical environments has become too complex. The alternative is to understand how the variability of human actions is a resource rather than a threat and to define safety as a system's resilience, its ability to adapt and adjust, rather than as the absence of adverse outcomes

The changing nature of risk

http://www.ergonomics.org.au/downloads/EA_Journals/EA_March_June_08.pdfInternational audienceThe crucial change that took place in the 19th century was that accidents became associated with the technological systems that people designed, built, and used as part of work, in the name of progress and civilisation. Suddenly, accidents happened not only because the people involved, today referred to as people at the sharp end, did something wrong or because of an act of nature, but also because a human-made system failed. Furthermore, the failures were no longer simple, such as a scaffolding falling down or a wheel axle breaking. The failures were complex, in the sense that they usually defied the immediate understanding of the people at the sharp end. In short, their knowledge and competence was about how to do their work, and not about how the technology worked or functioned. Before this change happened, people could take reasonable precautions against accidents at work because they understood the tools and artefacts they used sufficiently well. After this change had happened, that was no longer the case

Effects of a Night Vision Enhancement System (NVES) on Driving: Results from a Simulator Study

Three related experiments looked at the effects of an NVES on driving performance, with differences in image size ratio, lateral position and direct/indirect viewing as parameters. The experiments used experienced drivers in a fixed based virtual-reality driving simulator. Experiment 1 found that subjects using an NVES gained time to assess the situation and choose an appropriate response, which was seen in terms of better control of braking and swerving. Contrary to expectations, subjects did not drive significantly faster when using the NVES. Experiment 2 found that a 1:2 display ratio resulted in better anticipatory control without any adverse effects from differences in recognition distances. When using an NVES display displaced laterally from the normal line of sight, drivers kept the vehicle closer to the middle of the road. They also found the displaced position less favourable than one in the normal line of sight, although there were no strong negative effects of a the displacement. Experiment 3 compared a virtual (collimated) display to a direct viewing Flat Panel, with the hypothesis that reduced need of accommodation would lead to smoother driving. The results showed some differences between the two display types, although they were small compared to the effects of learning. Altogether the experiments confirmed that an NVES leads to an indisputable improvement in the drivers’ anticipatory control, and hence has considerable safety potential. This work has also emphasised the need to consider the combined effects of an NVES as a system on driving, rather than to do classical controlled experiments

Effects of a Night Vision Enhancement System (NVES) on Driving: Results from a Simulator Study

Three related experiments looked at the effects of an NVES on driving performance, with differences in image size ratio, lateral position and direct/indirect viewing as parameters. The experiments used experienced drivers in a fixed based virtual-reality driving simulator. Experiment 1 found that subjects using an NVES gained time to assess the situation and choose an appropriate response, which was seen in terms of better control of braking and swerving. Contrary to expectations, subjects did not drive significantly faster when using the NVES. Experiment 2 found that a 1:2 display ratio resulted in better anticipatory control without any adverse effects from differences in recognition distances. When using an NVES display displaced laterally from the normal line of sight, drivers kept the vehicle closer to the middle of the road. They also found the displaced position less favourable than one in the normal line of sight, although there were no strong negative effects of a the displacement. Experiment 3 compared a virtual (collimated) display to a direct viewing Flat Panel, with the hypothesis that reduced need of accommodation would lead to smoother driving. The results showed some differences between the two display types, although they were small compared to the effects of learning. Altogether the experiments confirmed that an NVES leads to an indisputable improvement in the drivers’ anticipatory control, and hence has considerable safety potential. This work has also emphasised the need to consider the combined effects of an NVES as a system on driving, rather than to do classical controlled experiments

Some myths about industrial safety

MINES ParisTech - CRC Technical Report.There are many definitions of safety, but most of them are variations on the theme that safety can be measured by the number of adverse outcomes. This vision has consequences for how industry thinks safety can be achieved. This paper looks at six safety-related assumptions, or safety myths, which impact industry practices. We argue that these practices are littered with fragile beliefs, which in many cases make the safety management flawed and ineffectual. The open acknowledgement of these myths is a necessary first step to genuinely improve industrial safety

Study on Developments in Accident Investigation Methods: A Survey of the "State-of-the-Art

Available on: http://www.stralsakerhetsmyndigheten.se/Global/Publikationer/Rapport/Sakerhet-vid-karnkraftverken/2008/SKI-Rapport-2008-50.pdfSKI Report 2008:50 (Swedish Nuclear Power Inspectorate) - ISSN 1104-1374The objective of this project was to survey the main accident investigation methods that have been developed since the early or mid-1990s. The motivation was the increasing frequency of accidents that defy explanations in simple terms, for instance cause-effect chains or “human error”. Whereas the complexity of socio-technical systems is steadily growing across all industrial domains, including nuclear power production, accident investigation methods are only updated when their inability to account for novel types of accidents and incidents becomes inescapable. Accident investigation methods therefore typically lag behind the socio-technological developments by 20 years or more

On The Art of Creating and Managing Policies: Facilitating the Emergence of Resilience

Available on: http://www.resilience-engineering.org/REPapers/Sundstrom_Hollnagel.pdfInternational audienceResilience denotes an organization's ability to adjust effectively to the multifaceted impact of internal and external events over a significant time period. To be resilient, an organisation must be able to deal with unexpected and disruptive events as well as to understand the longer term impact of such events. In the Financial Services domain this translates into the ability to identify and successfully manage risk at all levels in the organization while sustaining a profitable business. Key tools for risk management include effective policy design and policy management processes. Based on a system state view of businesses, the paper outlines some principles for organising policy design and processes related to policy management, using an example from the Financial Services as an illustration

Modelling Risk in Financial Services Systems: A Functional Risk Modelling Perspective

http://www.resilience-engineering.org/proceedingsRE3_1.htmlInternational audienceFinancial market events in 2007 and 2008 pose a fundamental challenge for traditional Financial Services industry risk assessment approaches such as Value at Risk (VaR) models and capital adequacy risk measures. Unexampled events such as the liquidity crunch of the global credit markets, and its impact on individual Financial Services firms, clearly demonstrated the need to complement VaR risk models and traditional risk metrics with other types of risk models and metrics. The goal of the present paper is to introduce such a different type of risk modelling framework, i.e., functional risk modelling. Key concepts from resilience engineering are introduced and leveraged to define the approach. The primary goal of the proposed modelling framework is to identify functional dependencies between a firm's business functions and the functions that drive key behaviours of the global financial markets. An example from 2007's financial markets is used to illustrate the proposed framework, i.e., the rapid demise of the UK based residential mortgage firm Northern Rock