About
The people behind the work.
Human in the System is built on operational experience, academic rigour and a belief that leadership and team performance can be taught, coached and improved through structured reflection on how work really happens.
Founder
Gareth Lock
Founder, Human in the System and The Human Diver
Many organisations investigate incidents to find out who made the mistake. Gareth has spent the better part of two decades arguing, with evidence and with practical frameworks, that this is the wrong question. The more useful questions are whether the capability existed before the event, and what in the system made the action seem normal at the time.
He has been on both sides of an incident report. As an RAF aircrew officer he made decisions where errors could not be undone, and as an investigator he has examined fatal accidents for two national defence forces. That combination shapes everything Human in the System does.
Why not learn the lessons from those who've had the most to lose when it goes wrong?
Military aviation
25 years in the Royal Air Force, with 2,500 flying hours as a C-130 navigator, alongside instructional, flight trials, research and procurement roles.
Fatal accident investigations
Reviews for the UK Ministry of Defence and the New Zealand Defence Force, bringing both the method and an understanding of what the findings cost.
MSc Human Factors and System Safety
Lund University. Thesis research on storytelling and learning in high-risk work, now a student mentor on the same programme.
MSc Aerospace Systems
Kingston University. Systems thinking from first principles: seeing operations as a system, not a collection of individuals.
Author
Under Pressure and Learning from Emergent Outcomes, along with the frameworks used across our programmes.
Keynote speaker
Speaking internationally on human factors, Just Culture, psychological safety and learning from success as well as failure.
The team
Practitioners in their own right.
The work is collaborative. Our associates bring their own operational experience and academic grounding, and they share the same commitment to learning over blame.
Lanny Vogel
Associate · Human factors practitioner
Lanny brings experience of senior military leadership, with a background spanning multinational headquarters, submarine operations and ministerial-level policy. He has led large, diverse teams where poor performance could not be undone.
His work with us centres on simulator-based facilitation for senior leadership teams in high-risk industries and defence, and on the honest, structured debrief that makes behaviour visible.
Andrzej Gornicki
Associate · Human performance specialist
Andrzej brings extensive experience of operational environments and a focus on human performance under pressure.
His work with us centres on facilitation and curriculum development across our European programmes. He holds that blame is the enemy of learning, and that most organisations choose blame because it is faster.
Mike Mason
Associate · Human factors practitioner
Mike has more than two decades of experience in military aviation as a front-line fast jet pilot, instructor and supervisor in the Royal Air Force and Royal Australian Air Force, with over 3,500 flying hours.
He brings that experience of performance under pressure, decision-making, teamwork and human and organisational performance to the teams he works with.
Andy Leonard
Associate · Human and Organisational Performance advisor
Andy is a retired US Army Colonel with more than 30 years of experience, including senior leadership of large, complex organisations in high-consequence settings.
His work with us helps leaders apply Human and Organisational Performance (HOP) principles to see how work actually happens. He turns case and incident analysis into practical learning, giving as much weight to everyday success as to adverse events.
Alongside our associates, a wider group of experienced facilitators delivers our programmes across Europe, North America and Australasia.
Our position
People don't fail in isolation.
They work inside systems with gaps between how work was imagined and how it is done, with authority gradients that stop information reaching the people who need it, and with debrief cultures that prefer reassurance to learning.
Our team has worked in military operations, emergency services, energy, healthcare and construction. What we share is not a single professional background but this position, and a belief that the people inside the system are the source of its resilience rather than its weakest link.
Our job is to make those conditions visible, and then to help you change them. That takes people who have been inside those systems, not only studied them.
Book a call
Start with a curious conversation.
Tell us what is happening in your organisation, what you have already tried, and what you would like to be different. We will be honest about whether we can help, and point you elsewhere if someone else would serve you better.
Prefer email? Write to [email protected] and we will reply within two working days.