These tools, approaches and methods will help you to address a wide range of real-world problems.

As the list of tools is updated, here you will find practical ways to help you understand incidents, assess situations or workplaces, and design new products, equipment or work environments.

Getting started

This section includes an approach to getting started in human factors; how to undertake a gap analysis of the key topics in your organisation, some tips on engaging external consultants, and some suggested roles in human factors for different staff groups. This is an approach…

Checklist for human factors

This checklist covers many of the topics introduced elsewhere on this website. You may find it a helpful starting point to understand which topics to focus on.

Investigative interviewing

The article emphasizes the importance of effective witness interviews in health and safety investigations. It contrasts traditional interviewing techniques that may hinder recall with the “cognitive interview” method, which encourages free narrative and uses psychological principles to enhance memory retrieval. This approach fosters greater accuracy…

Measuring workload: There’s an App for that

Measuring the workload that people experience is important, because subjective workload has an impact on human performance. A high workload eats into our limited mental resources and can lead to errors, near-misses and incidents. Workload is often measured by the resources available (such as nurse-to-patient…

Human factors: Preventing violations

Violations of procedures are a significant cause of many workplace accidents. This post introduces this type of human failures and includes a Briefing Note with strategies to prevent violations.

Safety Culture Discussion Cards

In 2012, I chaired the organising committee of a conference for the UK Chartered Institute of Ergonomics & Human Factors, and edited the conference proceedings. At this event there were several presentations on the topic of safety culture. A highlight of this session was a…

The “decision diary”: How to make better decisions

Despite our lives being shaped by the choices that we make, many people do not receive any training in making decisions. This article proposes that writing down key decisions in a diary, to be reviewed at a later date, provides an opportunity to learn and…

Ten facts about human failure

I find these ten facts about human failure a great way to engage delegates on human factors training courses.

This post also discusses Performance Influencing Factors, the things that make human failures more or less likely.

Learning from adverse events

There are nine key principles that organisations can apply to capture the human contribution to adverse events. These principles will help you to apply human factors in the investigation process. They also demonstrate how organisations learn (and fail to learn) from adverse events.

Valve Criticality Analysis (VCA)

Valve Criticality Analysis (VCA) is a technique to inform the location of valves and their access requirements, based on their criticality and frequency of use. This technique ensures that those valves critical to operations or safety, and those that are accessed most frequently, are easy…