How Human Factors training can help your business

Human Factors defined

Human Factors is a science blending many disciplines. It analyses how we behave in the real world to help us enhance our performance whilst also protecting our well-being.

Human Factors looks at how we think, how we act, and interact with our environment
Our team at Sapien Human Factors Consulting will help you assess the ways you engage with your environment and team for more error-free decision making under pressure
We’ll uncover what influences the way we act individually or collectively, including experience, biases, heuristics, the influence of others, cultural norms and hierarchy
Plus, we’ll look at how the design and operation of interfaces in our environment (computer terminals on a bank’s trading floor, for example) can profoundly affect error rates, injuries and efficiency.

Why it’s relevant to your organisation

Take a moment to consider the following questions and whether the answers could improve your business performance:

Why do highly competent individuals sometimes make seemingly irrational decisions?
Why do we miss obvious details that could have delivered a different outcome?
Why do teams make riskier decisions which individually they’d never accept?
Why are some of the most experienced people most at risk of flawed decision-making?
How do you create a culture where people admit their errors for others to learn from?
Why is intervention so difficult and can you make it more effective?
How do you build an effective team whose performance steadily improves over time?
Why can experts achieve peak performance in “flow” state and how do you reach it?
Why does intense pressure or uncertainty offer the greatest risk of error and innovation?
Can you increase both performance and well-being, or are they opposing forces?
Why are stress, fatigue and burnout so endemic in business and how can you reduce them?

On our Leadership courses, our team will guide you through the concepts of Emotional Response and Workload Management chosen by high-reliability organisations and their inter-relatedness with the three key elements in Human Factors:

All three Human Factors principles are mutually interdependent.
Your teams will need to become proficient in all to achieve the best outcomes.

Emotional Response

On our Sapien Human Factors Consulting courses we’ll show you how to:

Develop more resilience by building techniques to recognise ‘emotional hijack’
Understand how humans respond to strong stimuli and why
Recognise the difference between being a leader and a manager
Learn the difference between surprise and startle and their debilitating effects if incorrectly managed
Use techniques to mitigate the impact of both surprise and startle to more quickly regain normal cognitive function
Reduce the likelihood of errors and restore cognitive functioning more quickly in challenging situations
Appreciate the link between our physiology and cognition and how to more effectively manage them in harmony
Implement medium-term strategies to recover after challenging events
Prevent uncertainty from these challenges causing further cognitive failures
Deploy long-term strategies to effectively manage work stressors

These techniques are used during in-flight emergencies and are hard-won from fatal incidents in aviation and operating theatres.

Even if you are an expert in your field, strong external stimuli can catastrophically affect both your ability to think (cognition) and act (physiology).

These strong stimuli could be, for example, if something doesn’t go as expected (surprise) or an alarm goes off (startle). Both surprise and startle responses are hard wired into us as humans. The effects can last from just a few seconds to several minutes, preventing us from responding appropriately. These responses have helped us survive as a species. Often called our ‘fight, flight or freeze’ response, they’re designed to protect us from threats - such as predators. However, they are ill- suited to working in modern environments and operating complex equipment, such as on a bank trading floor, an aircraft flight deck, or an operating theatre. Our working environment has become more complex and the technology we use ever more so. However, our human responses to high stress or complex situations have not evolved.

When exposed to strong stimuli, our ‘fight, flight or freeze’ response may be triggered
This activation of the sympathetic nervous system can severely interrupt our cognitive function and change our physiological state
Any interruption of cognitive function in high workload environments can be catastrophic if we’re unable to think or act
We may take inappropriate actions, causing further problems and inhibiting clear thinking or decision making
We may not be aware of having taken these actions and even deny it afterwards
This phenomenon is well documented
Often investigators are puzzled why experts take seemingly irrational and dangerous actions during high stress [19]
Long-term exposure to stress is more insidious and equally damaging to our cognitive and physiological activities
This produces a cumulative emotional response
Research shows the effects of long-term stress on experts in high-stakes environments on emergency workers, commercial pilots and healthcare professionals. [20,21,22,23]

Workload Management

On our Sapien Human Factors Consulting courses we’ll show you how to:

Understand how your brain actually works and is able to process data
Recognise the factors that lead to high workload and use strategies to manage them
Become aware of what overload looks and feels like
Realise why it can be catastrophic
Improve your ability to manage a changing workload and take better decisions
Notice reducing Situational awareness in yourself and others and how to avoid it
Use strategies to regain Situational Awareness to help you and your team avoid errors and adverse outcomes
Appreciate how workload relates to and impacts other core work competencies
Discern the inter-relationship between cognitive capacity, workload and threat and error management
(This ‘threat and error management’ strategy is a cornerstone of safe operations on the flight deck.)

Workload is the cognitive processing that we are carrying out at any moment in time. Our capacity for this workload will depend on a variety of factors such as experience and expertise, familiarity with the specific work scenario, fatigue, our physical environment and the tools we are using (for example, our computer system).

Some tasks require conscious effort and thought, while others that we are very familiar with can be achieved using a high degree of automation. Remember when you learned to drive. Changing gear was difficult and required concentration. Today you can do it while listening to the radio and mulling over a work problem. Workload management is the ability to allocate attention, working memory, and decision-making capacity across tasks to keep Situational Awareness and performance within our cognitive limits.

Our senses receive vast amounts of data from the outside world
We can only process a fraction of that data, turning it into information and knowledge about the world around us
Whilst we think we can multi-task, the reality is the human brain can’t do this
Our brain can only switch between tasks, albeit rapidly, but this uses up valuable cognitive capacity. The brain has a finite limit of attention (what we can focus on), working memory (ability to hold and manipulate short-term data) and processing power
Sometimes, when faced with problems, we can experience overload
This is due to the number of challenges, their complexity - or time available to solve them
One of the symptoms of high workload can be the erosion of Situational Awareness, often without us being aware of this happening
High workload combined with declining Situational Awareness frequently leads to errors and generates poor outcomes
Having effective Workload Management strategies can reduce the chance of overload, improve Situational Awareness and generate better outcomes.

Ready for your high-performance leadership training?

Book our Sapien Human Factors Consulting course today.

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