Resources
What do people need to understand to perform well when it matters?
Articles, practical guides and books to help you start the work in your own organisation. Everything here is free to read, and the guides are free to download.
Articles
Recent writing.
The Investigation Trap
Most investigations find the person nearest the event, not the conditions that made it possible. Why the five whys usually stops at the wrong answer.
ReadAccountability Without the Witch Hunt
Every witch hunt teaches people the cost of honesty. How to build accountability that produces learning rather than silence.
ReadFive Things High-Reliability Organisations Do That Yours Probably Doesn't
Reliable organisations aren't accident-free by luck. The practices that make resilience part of how work is done can be learned.
ReadWho You Are Under Pressure Is Who You Actually Are
Non-technical skills degrade before technical ones. Why understanding them in comfort doesn't transfer, and practice does.
ReadThe Most Underused Learning Tool in Your Organisation
Stories carry the tacit knowledge that procedures can't. Treating them as organisational intelligence changes what you learn.
ReadThe Expert Blind Spot
Experience brings pattern recognition, and with it the risk of confident misidentification. Habits that help experienced teams check their assumptions.
ReadFree guides
Practical tools you can use this week.
Each guide is free. We ask for your email address so we can send it to you, and you can unsubscribe whenever you like.
Just Culture in Practice: a guide for small organisations
Just Culture as trust, learning and accountability, distinct from no-blame. How to respond to unwanted outcomes by asking how the action made sense at the time.
DEBrIEF guide
The debrief as a simplified investigation, and one of the most powerful learning tools available to high-risk teams.
UNITED-C briefing guide
The brief as the structured conversation that turns a group of individuals into a team with a shared mental model.
Building psychological safety in your team
Psychological safety as a prerequisite for operational performance and learning, not a soft add-on.
Why don't workers use Stop Work Authority?
Three studies showing why formal stop work schemes fail, and why the conditions around the policy decide whether it works.
Speaking truth to power: it's not that simple
Research across 3,600 employees on why willingness to speak up falls down the hierarchy, and why leaders overestimate how well they listen.
WITH: understanding error-producing conditions
A framework for spotting the conditions that make errors more likely: work environment, individual characteristics, task demands and human nature.
LFEO and LEODSI: framework overview
An introduction to Learning from Emergent Outcomes and the frameworks behind our learning reviews, including the gap between work as imagined and work as done.
Books
Go deeper.
New · Pre-orders open in November
Learning from Emergent Outcomes
When something goes wrong, the first question is often “who messed up?”
The practical companion to Under Pressure, and the framework behind our learning reviews. It shows how to prepare for a review, discover what happened without blame, make sense of what you find and embed the learning so practice changes. Its stories come from diving, and the method applies to any team that works with risk. Pre-orders open in November.
Gareth Lock MSc
Register your interestAvailable now
Under Pressure
Diving deeper with human factors
Gareth's first book translates decades of research and practice from aviation and other high-risk work into the world of diving, through detailed case studies on human error, non-technical skills and how they shape performance. Written for divers, it has found a wide readership among people who have never been underwater.
Gareth Lock MSc
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The guides start the thinking. Our programmes build the capability.
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