cothinkacademy.training

Who is Human Factor Analysis for?

Everyone who is involved in problem solving knows how often human behaviours can be a major part of the problem, in particular people not adhering to the standards or procedures they are supposed to adhere to, leading to accidents and major incidents.

In such cases, the instinctive reaction often consists of blaming the person or group concerned and wondering how anyone could be so “dumb”as to do whatever it is was they did.

However looking at undesirable behaviors through the prism of  “Psychological Egoism”, a theory attributed to Hobbes and Bentham, whereby deep-down we are always motivated by what we perceive to be in our own short term or long-term self-interest, will almost always reveal that behaviors that can look strange to the outside observer make perfect sense to the person or group concerned.This is the foundation  on which Human Factor Analysis is built. 

When eliminating an undesirable behaviour and/or obtaining a desired behaviour is important, Human Factor Analysis, a rigorous yet practical methodology designed to help you understand why people do the things they do, is certainly one of the most effective approaches available.

Given this, Human Factor Analysis is a must for anyone : HSE Managers, Incident Managers, Quality Managers… who works on the  elimination of human errors and /or undesirable behaviors in general. It can also be a very useful tool for Line Managers who need to understand the undesirable behavior of a « difficult » employee or group.

What will you learn?

Designed to help you first understand the underlying causes of undesirable behaviors and then identify and implement appropriate countermeasures, with our on-line Human Factor Analysis training course you will learn the following:

• How to formulate the behavioral problem (Output) in a factual, actionable manner.
• How to use a systematic review of Inputs, the Person or Group concerned, Consequences and Feedback to identify the root causes of the behavioral problem.
• How to integrate Human Factor Analysis into your overall problem resolution process

Course Content.

• One highly interactive on-line training modules:
  • Human Factor Analysis: Detailed presentation of the 3 steps of the Human Factor Analysis methodology illustrated through a highly interactive, case study based, example.
    
    
• One “homework” exercise + corrected solution : Based on a more complex case study than the one used in the interactive Human Factor Analysis module, this exercise is  a further opportunity to gain practical experience going through all the steps of our HFA processs.
  
  
• An Excel based HFA & BoC template.

Time required.

Including the homework exercise, this course can take about 2 hours. 

Recommended prerequisites.

While Human Factor Analysis can be used as a stand-alone methodology, we highly recommend that you first do the courses below: 

• Information gathering and questioning technique: The quality of the information you have available to you and your ability to question effectively will determine the quality of your Human Factor Analysis. For those who have no formal training in this area, this course, which includes theory and practise exercises, provides very helpful guidelines on the key questions that need to be asked in any problem situation and how to ask them in a manner which insures high quality answers.

• Event Mapping: In any case where a problem can’t be attributed to a unique cause-effect chain it is always worthwhile to do an overall problem evaluation before doing a Human Factor Analysis. In almost all cases, this will allow you to see issues that would have been overlooked otherwise. Furthermore, Event Mapping allows you to organise and categorise all the information available about a problem situation in a format which is particularly easy to share with others, from the initial problem evaluation through to the choice of corrective measures, their implementation and validation.

These courses are provided along with Human Factor Analysis in a reduced price package called "Accident & Incident Investigations."