Human Factors Data

The collection and analysis of safety-related data is an important part of the safety management system. Traditionally, many organisations’ safety efforts have focused almost solely on analysing adverse events, or “what goes wrong” through incident investigations. It is important to understand and learn from adverse events and prevent similar occurrences in the future. However, if the only focus of safety analysis is on what goes wrong, organisations are missing out on valuable learning about how work is really done, and why things go right. When you know what it is that makes the system effective and resilient you can take steps to ensure those elements are maintained and strengthened (and not inadvertently removed!).

One way to assess how things go right is to obtain safety-related data and insights from a range of sources including:

• Normal operations monitoring
• Confidential reporting
• Interviews/surveys/workshops

Information from these data sources can be used to identify the types of threats and operational complexity and variability that operators encounter and manage successfully day to day.  We specialise in transforming data into meaningful insights about human-system performance, which can be used to make practical improvements.