Even as engineered systems become more complex, the need to intervene at times will continue, with little or no reduction in urgency. So, how humans make their decisions and how this contributes to overall system performance becomes increasingly significant.

In December, the Hazards Forum invited three guest speakers to a hybrid webinar to explore how engineering should embrace the non-technical skills that have increased safety and reduced risk in other professions.

Between them, Rhona Flin, Professor of Industrial Psychology at Aberdeen Business School, Robert Gordon University, Helen Conlin, head of HSSE at Stanlow Terminals, and Andrew Sherry, Professor of Materials and Structures at the University of Manchester, mapped out a blueprint for making engineering safer. 

They covered how and why people make safety decisions at the sharp end, the different types of decision making, and the significance of non-technical skills (NTS), illustrated with examples from the nuclear industry, from aviation and surgery.

Protocols, like those mandated for ‘front line’ professionals like pilots and surgeons, may be missing for engineers. Aviation is 40 years ahead in collecting evidence and coding data to assess what impact front line human decision-making had on an aviation incident. This was done to change how pilots and cabin crew are trained to behave in the future, as many accidents were seen to be caused by human decision-making rather than technical failure. 

By comparison, real-world engineers use intuitive ‘fast thinking’ – pattern recognition – to make decisions when facing a safety crisis, and wash ups do not dig any deeper into ‘why’ things went wrong. 

While design engineers, project managers, operations managers, or even process safety professionals may all have taken decisions that contributed to a disaster, blame often sticks to the unlucky front-line operator who flicked the switch at the end.

Engineering needs a structured, evidence-based competence framework covering all career phases. This needs to be balanced across technical knowledge and skills, and NTS. Importantly, these NTS should be developed to have a defined performance standard, that can be assessed and assured.  

Educators, employers, and professional institutions all have roles in increasing the market value of NTS – making them part of the undergraduate curriculum, assessing them for chartered status, setting targets for them in annual appraisals. The potential for this was seen to exist, though the funding and crucially the momentum to act seem to be lacking.

As part of IChemE’s significant work on major hazards management, surveys suggest NTS are misunderstood. Participants gave them low priority as a safety measure, while ‘communication’ – a vital component of NTS – was given a high rating in another form of question. All three speakers enthusiastically embraced story telling as a powerful method of communicating information about the behaviours that add to and reduce risk. Supported by data, these memorable anecdotes of how human decisions averted disaster (maybe at the very last second) could be harnessed by engineering to create its own NTS.

The conclusion was that engineering needs to catch up. It needs evidence from data and experienced professionals from across the subfields, gathered using meaningful language and behaviours, and disseminated through thoughtful engagement, and where possible, organic peer-to-peer learning. There was no dispute that NTS are essential, not a ‘nice to have’.

Q&A

How do we better champion and reward the application of non-technical skills (NTS) in industrial safety?

Fundamentally, NTS need to appear in the undergraduate programmes, and be examinable or tested, the panel agreed. This would show students, and professional institutions, they were fundamental to risk management or engineering practise rather than ‘nice to have’. Though the panel agreed that was a big ask, with already full undergraduate programmes, they offered other approaches to rewarding NTS. 

They need to be recognised as ‘better currency’ for engineers in all career phases.  There’s a sense that while individuals recognise the importance of NTS, ultimately more momentum is needed at an organisational level. 

Employers can show they value NTS by setting goals for individuals’ personal development in annual appraisals. Although such a system is generally in place with the UK standard for professional engineering competence (UK-SPEC), professional institutions could increase focus on non-technical skills as competencies to be measured to get chartered engineer status for example. 

Even investigations into why projects went over budget or incidents occurred could raise the perceived value of NTS, if they developed the mindset of looking beyond technical factors. Were there any problems in decision making? Did anybody under-estimate the risk or the time here? What was the leadership like in this whole project? This needs to consider all communications up the chain from the last front-line person left touching the hazard.

Engineering benefits a lot from people with different thought patterns. Neurodiversity can make personal interactions a bit more difficult – does that present problems with NTS?

While not having studied neurodiversity, all the panel members said they had been asked questions about it recently. They recognised the need to value difference and the need to train and develop the capability to interact with people who are ‘different from us’. This needs to be built into training and development, to develop communications, understanding and empathy.

Regardless of neurodiversity, the NTS approach is focused on behaviour, rather than underlying personality. The point of a safety principle is understanding what the safe behaviours for the operations are. It’s about ensuring that there are different pathways for making those behaviours available for development, assessment, and assurance.

In aviation, for example, it’s about each person understanding their preferred way of behaving. So, a very quiet, introverted person is going to have to talk more, because one of the safe principles is about sharing information and having shared mental models regarding what is happening. An extrovert person who likes to talk must learn when to be quiet as well, because you might interrupt the other person’s thinking or distract them. 

Team competency should also be considered, as this could be a way to balance differences in individuals’ technical skills and NTS.

How can we ensure that we change behaviours at an operator level? There’s a real challenge around delivering cultural shift.

The panel agreed different approaches were needed for different groups of people. Groups need material presented and behaviours described in a language that is meaningful for them. You’re most likely to build understanding if practitioners, rather than just educators, pass on knowledge to other practitioners. This can also surface unwritten performance standards of experts on the ground. 

In fact, it’s vital to go deeper and consider the specific mental model that is behind a safety culture; what are the internal and external influences on group behaviour in an organisation? A disaster 30 years ago could still be affecting how people behave and relate to each today, setting the template for an organisation’s sociotechnical system. 

Then the ‘how’ of cultural change needs to be engaging and thoughtfully designed, enticing people to buy into new behaviours. And persistence is essential because there is no quick fix; achieving cultural change is a slow burn, with visible and consistent participation by leaders being essential for success. 

Competence standards have been developed for front line roles such as surgeons, air crew and so on, while the Macondo incident was an example of the relative informality of decision-making by engineers. What can we learn in developing and mandating competency standards for engineers, who are one step removed from the front line? 

Though broadly speaking, engineering needs to collect evidence about behaviours that increase safety and those that increase risk, and then code the data, storytelling was a common thread to the panel’s answers.

The lived experiences of expert practitioners provide valuable, field-specific data that can mirror that collected for surgeons or pilots. It could be about asking ‘tell me about a day that went really well’ or, more likely remembered, a ‘day that was a bit challenging’. Often the story is about how the situation was rescued, how something was noticed in time, or how somebody spoke up. 

Though engineering has plenty of evidence, it needs the funding, the will, and the momentum to pull it together.  As well as building data, time spent sharing stories should be valued as way to pass on knowledge, peer-to-peer or from expert to novice. Stories can give context, bring lessons to life and make it easier to build expertise.

Final comments from Richard Roff, Chair of Hazards Forum’s interest group on engineered systems hazards:

This event brought knowledgeable speakers together with an audience that had great questions.  Although the session was necessarily limited, the engineered systems hazards interest group will aim to keep the discussion around NTS alive through its regular discussions.

Senior engineers and managers across various sectors should reflect on whether they properly understand how NTS contribute to their organisation’s successes or failures – pinpointing the behaviours that lead to success will allow them to focus development programmes for their junior staff, to measure these as leading performance indicators and to direct investigations into unwanted events to consider these properly.

All engineers and subject matter experts working in technical environments should reflect on what skills they employ, beyond the technical, that lead to success and those behaviours that might have led to poorer outcomes.  Make time to read around your subject – to look at approaches in other sectors.  Take time to read some more about non-technical skills and their development in the sectors mentioned above.To find out more about our three Interest Groups, please visit the webpage.