On this episode of the Salience Podcast, we turn our attention to the relationship between human factors, systems, and analysis of safety incidents and accidents. As you might imagine, a company with a name like Frontline Mind is intimately involved with frontline action. The agencies and people we specialize in work in fast-paced, complex, and at times high-risk environments. Inevitably, there are near misses, incidents and accidents.

How we best learn from these is not straightforward. In fact, when we work with agencies for the first time, we find that most after-action reviews or operational or cold debriefs have made matters worse. Partly, this is because there is an unrealistic focus on events that emerge and are only visible in hindsight. This is partly because there is a strong focus on errors and what went wrong. We can see and hear this bias in a deficit-based language where there is a focus on what went wrong. Now, I'm not a fan of an exclusive focus on what went well either. The danger of overdone positivity or staying in happy, clappy land is also unhelpful and is just as much of a concern as an obsession with what went wrong. So it's this use of language and the way we can direct attention that we are going to focus on today. And to help us unpack, how we can learn from near misses, incidents and accidents without falling into a judgmental binary of good and bad.

we are joined by Dr. Steven Shorrock from Eurocontrol, where he works to support aviation throughout Europe with human factors, applied psychology and systems thinking and practice. Steven is a chartered psychologist and human factor specialist. He is editor in-chief of Hindsight Magazine and adjunct associate professor at the University of the Sunshine Coast Center for Human Factors and Sociotechnical Systems.

For more information about The Salience Podcast and Frontline Mind please visit our website at https://www.frontlinemind.com/the-salience-podcast/ You can also sign up for our newsletter here https://frontlinemind.us17.list-manage.com/subscribe?u=ff181d12c77d7cea5f19a2c48&id=fd7357f614

On this episode of the Salience Podcast we return to cross-domain mapping, exploring how tactical leadership and decision-making taught in the military can be applied to start-up and scale-up challenges for business and as a way to accelerate change in frontline agencies. One of the biggest challenges for military-trained leaders is adapting to the radically different power structure of civilian organisations. For starters, command and control just doesn't work the same way.

I often see veterans appointed to civilian leadership roles and the civies just don't respond at all well to being told. I've seen the opposite where veterans really do lead adaptively using a range of leadership approaches that suit the situation. So today I want to tease apart the difference that makes a difference in effective leadership and decision making through that military lens. Today's guest is Ben Ford from Mission Control.

Ben is a former Royal Marine and uses what he learned in the Defence Force to help veteran entrepreneurs develop a competitive advantage in business. I first came across Ben through LinkedIn where I noticed his posts about OODA, John Boyd's Observe, Orient, Decide, Act decision-making framework and how to apply that process in tech.

For more information about The Salience Podcast and Frontline Mind please visit our website at https://www.frontlinemind.com/the-salience-podcast/ You can also sign up for our newsletter here https://frontlinemind.us17.list-manage.com/subscribe?u=ff181d12c77d7cea5f19a2c48&id=fd7357f614

On This episode of the Salience Podcast, we explore risk and decision-making and consider what we can learn from fatal mistakes. In a number of our interviews, we have stressed the importance of safe to fail experimentation. This is of course the preferred way to learn. However, we can also learn from critical incidents that are not fatal to us. In today's interview we discuss one such profound experience that inspires me to remember some important aspects of human factors in decision making.

Today's guest is Ken Wiley. Ken is a mounting guide by training, although he is known globally as an author, an engaging public speaker, and through his company Archetypal, he is an advisory and human hazard management educator. In 2003, Ken survived an avalanche that resulted in fatal consequences for seven guided clients.

In a very humble way, Ken acknowledges he was part of a professional team whose failure to communicate and work together with mutual respect resulted in the fatal avalanche. Ken has detailed the background to the tragedy in his best -selling book, Buried. I recently had the privilege of listening to Ken's story at an avalanche conference in New Zealand. There are many similarities with what we teach in Frontline Mind. So I was inspired to reach out to Ken to relay his story on the Salient's podcast and pass along some of the most important lessons to our listeners.

For more information about The Salience Podcast and Frontline Mind please visit our website at https://www.frontlinemind.com/the-salience-podcast/ You can also sign up for our newsletter here https://frontlinemind.us17.list-manage.com/subscribe?u=ff181d12c77d7cea5f19a2c48&id=fd7357f614