How do workmates get along when one of them is a robot? Is music helpful in an operating theatre? And what could a vet in Africa learn from Piper Alpha to help relocate endangered rhinos?
These are just some of the questions encountered by Aberdeen Professor Rhona Flin during her decades of research into human behaviour in safety-critical roles.
Rhona is Professor of Industrial Psychology at RGU Business School and Emeritus Professor in Applied Psychology at Aberdeen University.
Her work on “safety in the hot seat” has had an impact in every sector from health to aviation across five continents.
So-called ‘non-technical skills’ are Rhona’s area of expertise and, as she explains, they can mean the difference between life and death.
Rhona and fellow authors Paul O’Connor and Tom Reader are currently revising their influential book on this subject, Safety At The Sharp End.
The book highlights the non-technical skills of situation awareness, decision-making, communication, team-working, leadership, managing stress and coping with fatigue.
That may all sound quite complex, but it can be as basic as noticing how people speak to each other.
Rhona says these are skills we all have, but those “at the sharp end” need to deploy them wisely.
We’ve had a conversation with Rhona to find out more about her insights into psychology, and life and death safety, in all sorts of fields…
Aviation, and oil and gas
For example, US naval aviators are now trained to use tone and volume, as well as words, when guiding pilots to land on aircraft carriers.
It’s the difference between saying softly, “a little power” if the landing trajectory needs a slight correction, to loudly saying “POWER” if it’s off by a lot.
Politeness has contributed to accidents. On an Air Florida flight in 1982, ice caused the instruments to give false readings.
The first officer failed to get the captain’s attention when he said, unassertively: “That don’t seem right, does it?”
The book charts incidents where there has been a failure in non-technical skills, including Chernobyl, The Herald of Free Enterprise, Hillsborough and Piper Alpha.
At Piper Alpha there was a failure in communication during a shift handover.
Rhona worked initially in the area of child witnesses and her PhD was on children’s memory before moving to RGU Business School in 1985.
“The oil industry was growing and I became interested in management and leadership behaviours on oil platforms,” she said.
“The idea of doing work around helicopter pilots also interested me.
“The first PhD student I supervised wanted to work on occupational stress, a fashionable topic in the 1980s.
“Then the Piper Alpha disaster happened and The Cullen Inquiry highlighted a number of issues.
“There were technical findings related to preventing explosions and improving safety systems.
“However, there were also findings that caught my interest, particularly regarding the behaviour of offshore installation managers, OIMs, on the night of the event.
“The inquiry criticised the OIMs on Piper Alpha as well as those on the adjacent platforms, for not shutting down quickly enough.”
Rhona was inspired to take a closer look at the ability of OIMs to take command in an emergency.
“I got a contract from the Health and Safety Executive to look into the selection, training, and competence assessment of OIMs.
“There weren’t many other academics working in this field.
“I looked at how other agencies, like the military and aviation, selected and trained people to handle emergencies.
“I worked with another psychologist, Georgina Slaven, and we focused on the non-technical skills that are essential in high-risk environments.
“Aviation had already developed specific training for non-technical skills.
“This approach became especially relevant after a major accident in the 1970s in Tenerife, where two jumbo jets collided on the runway in poor visibility.
“Experts used voice recordings to understand what went wrong.
“The takeaway was that technical expertise wasn’t enough to prevent accidents.”
Rhona then worked with psychologists and airline captains in a European research project to create a system for rating pilots’ non-technical skills.
The NOTECHS system identified skills like teamwork and communication and is still used today.
“Our team was one of the few specialising in offshore psychology,” she said.
“We had the opportunity to apply some lessons from aviation to the oil industry.”
“Even though people are doing very different jobs in different environments, with different technology, the fundamental skills needed are actually quite similar,” she said.
“It’s not surprising, humans have the same brains, the same physiology and are emotionally affected by the same sorts of things.
“We’re looking more at behaviour than personality, because you have a choice about behaviour.
“If you’re a talkative person, you may need to learn to talk less in circumstances where you’re distracting someone.
“If you have a quieter disposition, you may need to talk more to share what you’re doing with your team.”
Music in operating theatres
Sometimes music is played in operating theatres but it may not benefit the whole team, said Rhona.
“The volume might be turned down when surgeons are concentrating, but when nurses are counting instruments, it may be turned back up,” she said.
Taking such things into consideration is a non-technical skill that’s “about protecting everyone’s cognition”, said Rhona.
“But they aren’t new or mysterious behaviours. It’s about learning to apply these behaviours effectively.”
The Air Florida incident showed the dangers of politeness, but recent research from the US has highlighted the risk of rudeness or aggression in a work team.
“These behaviours can be damaging to people’s thinking skills because they either distract or trigger emotional responses that interfere with concentration,” said Rhona.
“Studies have shown that being the target of rudeness can affect your thinking, but even witnessing such incidents between others can have a similar effect on you.
“It can cause people to miss steps or fail to communicate effectively.”
When the first anaesthetic operating theatre simulator was introduced in Scotland, Rhona and her team were called on again.
“We developed a framework called Anaesthetists’ Non-Technical Skills (ANTS) to identify and define the behaviours necessary for safe, effective practice.”
This led to more work with surgeons and similar training for them.
“Now, the College of Surgeons in Edinburgh has a faculty dedicated to training surgeons in non-technical skills, and this training is now being adopted globally.
“For instance, if you’re watching a surgeon work, you might look for how well they’re gathering information, or how effectively they’re communicating with their team.”
Relocating rhinos
With Amy Irwin at Aberdeen University, Rhona has also worked with forestry and fishing.
She went on: “I received an email this week from a very interesting chap, a vet in Africa, who deals with the movement of big, endangered animals. To relocate a rhino they have to capture and transport it.
“He’s interested in this work. He thinks it would help their teams.”
In “resource-limited parts of the world” non-technical skills can be even more important, as Rhona discovered from surgeons in Africa.
She said: “I thought, they don’t even have enough operating theatres or equipment. How do they have time for this sort of approach?”
“But the surgeons said: ‘We don’t have the same level of aftercare. The importance of not making unnecessary errors and getting it right the first time is huge’.
“This is a very low-cost intervention because a lot of it is just teaching awareness.
“They’re not learning some strange new behaviours.
“You’re asking people to do normal things like support each other or speak up if they think something’s not right.”
Rhona said in aviation there had been a move to flatten the “authority gradient”.
How do you work with a robot?
One way to do this was by crew and captain calling each other by their first names.
“You need to create an atmosphere that allows people to speak,” said Rhona. “Subtle changes can make a big impact.”
She added: “If there’s a change, like aircraft becoming more automated, there are new issues.
“For example, how do you work together when there’s a robot in your team? How much do you trust automation?
“We may need different skill sets to deal with that.
“Working with pilots, surgeons and other professionals, I’ve learned so much from them, and hopefully, they’ve learned some psychology along the way.
“That’s what I would want to have achieved, showing the usefulness of psychology for real-world problems.
“If I’ve achieved that, that would be a good outcome.”
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