Webinar: Does Inattention impact safety

This webinar was originally presented on 5 August 2020

Webinar presentation titled: Does Inattention impact safety.  Presented by Cristian Sylvestre, Managing Director at HabitSafe.

Safety is more than systems to manage risk, rules to increase compliance or leadership conversations to strengthen culture. It’s also about “in the moment” decisions, or more precisely, the lack of them. In 95% of incidents, inattention has affected our "in the moment” decisions. After an incident, organisations look to modify the system, improve the person's knowledge, or increase the number of leadership conversations.

Although worth doing, these actions do little to help people minimise inattention and prevent future incidents. An additional way of thinking about safety is also required. We think hard about safety at an organisational level. We also need to think about it at the individual level, particularly how to strengthen skills and habits so inattention at critical times can be minimised.

Neuroscience has mapped the internal functions of the human brain, highlighting that most of what we do is not conscious, but largely automated. We can now say with certainty we are biologically designed to function on autopilot, with our conscious brains going into "neutral" when we do familiar or repetitive tasks. This is why doing things in autopilot is a commonly observed behaviour. But it's not the only biological design to affect decision-making. Mental stress, generated from external events and internal perceptions also disrupts our ability to pay attention, increasing the risk of incidents.

We have been looking at human behaviour from the outside-in for 40 years. Now we can see it from the inside out, and the view is very different. The good news is, research has identified a simple model for how inattention comes about, and what can be done to deal with it more effectively, enabling people to make safer “in the moment” decisions. Organisations which adopted this thinking see a dramatic improvement in safety performance.

LEARNING OUTCOMES 

Attendees will be provided with an understanding of the following:

• How decisions are actually made in the human brain.
• How the subconscious mind drives "in the moment" decisions under different situations.
• The impact of “in the moment” decisions on safety performance.
• How autopilot comes about and what other factors enable inattention.
• The contribution of inattention to personal safety incidents.
• Three tools designed to help organisations minimise inattention and improve "in the moment" decisions.

This new perspective is consistent with VisionZero and complements systems, leadership, and other approaches such as Safety Differently.

COST TO ACCESS RECORDING 
AIHS / AIOH / HFESA Members - $10.00 +GST
Non-Members - $30.00 +GST

YOUR PRESENTER 

Cristian Sylvestre, Managing Director, HabitSafe 
Cristian’s 25-year safety career started at ICI and then move to Shell for 10 years. In this environment, he learned a different way of thinking about safety. In 2004 he founded HabitSafe to develop a different approach to managing safety. As Managing Director, he applies the latest brain science and behavioural research to improve safety outcomes for organisations, often when performance has plateaued. Cristian is also an author. He wrote “Third Generation Safety: The Missing Piece” to explain his work. As a professional chemical engineer, and having completed a Masters, he is trained to analyse complex systems and processes, and to use evidence-based science and hard data to deliver positive safety outcomes.