Status Quo Bias is the tendency to stick with familiar choices, even when better options exist, and it impacts decisions in many areas, including diving. From Coca-Cola's "New Coke" failure to nitrox's initial resistance in the diving world, this bias highlights our preference for the familiar and reluctance to embrace change. It shows up in dive site routes we repeat, equipment setups we hesitate to adjust, and training paths we follow without exploring alternatives. Being aware of this bias ca...
Jul 05, 2025•5 min
This episode dives into the complexities of risk, decision-making, and resilience, blending personal experience with critical lessons for divers and beyond. Host Gareth Lock recounts his journey from peak physical fitness to surviving a near-fatal cardiac event, emphasizing the importance of recognizing weak signals, confronting cognitive biases, and understanding that safety isn’t just about training or equipment but also mindset and preparedness. Gareth challenges us to think critically about ...
Jul 02, 2025•16 min
This episode explores the Efficiency Thoroughness Trade-Off (ETTO), a concept by Erik Hollnagel that explains how we balance being thorough and efficient in everyday tasks, including diving. Using relatable examples like incomplete checks and forgotten tasks, we discuss how time pressures and biases often lead us to prioritize productivity over safety—usually with successful outcomes, but occasionally with costly mistakes. We examine how ETTO influences individual and organizational decisions, h...
Jun 28, 2025•7 min
This episode dives into a powerful, real-life story of a cave diving incident that highlights the importance of psychological safety, trust, and clear communication in high-stakes environments. The narrative explores how a seemingly small misunderstanding about gas pressure spiraled into a stressful situation, showcasing the impact of doubt and unspoken concerns within a team. Lessons learned include the value of speaking up, taking responsibility, and building a culture of questioning and trust...
Jun 25, 2025•10 min
Why do we do things the way we do? This question is at the heart of a story about a family’s tradition of cutting the ends off meat before cooking—a habit traced back to a Great Grandmother’s small tray. The tale highlights how unexamined habits can persist long after their original purpose is gone. In diving, the same applies to the debate over teaching students on their knees versus neutrally buoyant. While the former method made sense in the past, equipment advancements and new techniques now...
Jun 21, 2025•4 min
In this episode, we discuss the complexities of learning from mistakes and adverse events in diving and beyond. Using real-world examples, including a technical diving error and a high-profile medical case, we explore how systemic pressures, biases like hindsight and confirmation bias, and the gap between "work as imagined" and "work as done" influence decisions. We highlight the importance of Just Culture in fostering open discussions and meaningful learning, emphasizing that improving safety m...
Jun 18, 2025•11 min
In this episode, we explore how context drives behavior and how mistakes can happen even to experienced professionals. Sharing a personal story about a diving oversight, we examine how time pressures, language barriers, and assumptions led to a dangerous error—and the lessons learned from it. Highlighting the importance of psychological safety and robust pre-dive checks, we discuss why understanding "how it made sense at the time" is key to improving safety and preventing future mistakes. Tune i...
Jun 14, 2025•6 min
Mistakes, slips, and lapses are a natural part of human performance, influenced by factors like training, time pressures, and equipment design. While rule-breaking may seem deliberate, it's often shaped by context, social pressures, and the perceived benefits of deviation. Biases like hindsight, outcome, and severity distort how we interpret incidents, leading to blame rather than understanding. Effective learning requires exploring why decisions made sense at the time and avoiding counterfactua...
Jun 11, 2025•12 min
In this episode, we explore how instructors can balance leadership with fostering psychological safety in diving education. Psychological safety, defined as a "rewarded vulnerability," is crucial for creating environments where mistakes, questions, and challenges to the status quo are welcomed without fear of ridicule or blame. By understanding and implementing the four stages of psychological safety—Inclusion, Learner, Contributor, and Challenger safety—diving leaders can create teams that thri...
Jun 07, 2025•17 min
In this episode, we explore the importance of checklists in diving, inspired by lessons from aviation and medicine. After a tragic 1935 plane crash, pilots introduced simple checklists to reduce human error—an approach now standard in high-risk industries. Checklists help compensate for our natural forgetfulness and distractions by providing quick prompts for essential tasks. For divers, effective checklists should be simple, fit for the environment, and backed by proper training. Teams benefit ...
Jun 04, 2025•8 min
Experience and practice are crucial for making better decisions, especially in uncertain situations, but they aren’t the same. Perfect practice builds expertise, while varied experiences across different environments enhance decision-making by expanding mental patterns. Decision-making relies on situational awareness, which involves sensing, understanding, and projecting future outcomes, all influenced by our training, memories, and expectations. Models like Gary Klein’s recognition-primed decis...
May 31, 2025•8 min
In this episode, we explore how human perception and assumptions can lead to critical errors, using real-world examples like the tragic 1994 friendly fire incident where two US helicopters were mistaken for enemy aircraft. These events highlight the dangers of "believing is seeing" and how expectations can shape our decisions under pressure. We connect these lessons to diving, where incomplete information and mental shortcuts can result in serious incidents. Learn how to reduce errors by validat...
May 28, 2025•15 min
In this episode, we discuss integrating Human Factors training into technical diving courses, inspired by a new program blending eLearning, hands-on skills, and real-world exploration. The program emphasized teamwork, leadership, and psychological safety, with the DEBRIEF model becoming a standout tool for improving feedback and team efficiency. Students embraced these concepts, leading to more effective learning and collaboration. Lessons learned included refining teaching methods, incorporatin...
May 24, 2025•5 min
In this episode, we explore the complexities of situational awareness (SA) in diving and why it's often only recognized as missing after an event has occurred. SA involves interpreting sensory data and predicting future outcomes based on experience. Experienced divers may notice subtle signs of danger, like coral movements indicating currents or rust falling in a wreck, while novices lack the knowledge to anticipate or respond. Distractions, limited mental capacity, or unclear information can di...
May 21, 2025•5 min
In this blog, a diver reflects on a simulated rescue scenario during a PADI Rescue Course, highlighting critical lessons about human factors in diving. The incident underscores the impact of high task focus, reduced situational awareness, and psychological stress, which led a student to run critically low on gas without asking for help. The writer explores contributing factors, including the challenges of operating in cold, low-visibility conditions, the pressures of performing under assessment,...
May 17, 2025•8 min
Pre-dive checks are essential for diving safety, but they’re often rushed or overlooked, especially on busy dive boats. Factors like time pressure, peer pressure, distractions, and overconfidence can lead divers to skip thorough checks, relying instead on past outcomes. However, regardless of experience, using a familiar checklist with your buddy is key to ensuring equipment works and everyone knows how to assist in an emergency. While dive boats may not always allow for perfect checks, taking t...
May 14, 2025•6 min
In this episode, Gareth Lock explores the critical role of situation awareness and risk management in diving, emphasizing the importance of building accurate mental models to anticipate and manage potential hazards. He discusses how assumptions, experience, and training shape decision-making, and highlights the distinction between managing risks logically and addressing uncertainty through mental shortcuts and emotions. Gareth shares how The Human Diver promotes non-technical skills, psychologic...
May 09, 2025•5 min
In this blog, Bart Den Ouden shares a personal experience highlighting the importance of psychological safety, vulnerability, and human factors in diving. While teaching a rebreather instructor course, Bart forgot a critical piece of equipment, turning the oversight into a teachable moment. He emphasizes that instructors, as humans, can make mistakes, and fostering open communication and trust among divers is essential for safety and learning. By reflecting on errors—intentional or accidental—di...
May 07, 2025•8 min
The first-ever Human Factors in Diving Conference, held on September 24-25, 2021, brought together 27 speakers from around the world to explore the application of human factors, non-technical skills, Just Culture, and psychological safety in diving. Spanning nearly 25 hours of content over two days, the event showcased a global virtual conference model using the LexGo Live platform, with a focus on interactive and engaging experiences. Despite challenges with ticket sales, tight deadlines, and t...
May 03, 2025•20 min
Accidents in diving, and life, rarely stem from a single "root cause" but rather from a complex interplay of factors—technical skills, context, randomness, and non-technical skills like communication and decision-making. This episode explores how cognitive biases, such as the fundamental attribution error, often lead us to blame individuals rather than considering the broader system in which events unfold. Drawing parallels from diving, surgery, and other high-stakes environments, we discuss the...
Apr 30, 2025•11 min
In this episode, Gareth Lock delves into the nature of human error, exploring concepts like slips, lapses, mistakes, and violations through the lens of safety research and diving experiences. Drawing on James Reason’s work, Gareth explains how understanding errors and violations—whether unintended or situational—can foster learning, reduce outcome bias, and improve safety systems. By openly discussing mistakes, instructors can lower authority gradients, increase psychological safety, and promote...
Apr 26, 2025•11 min
In this episode, Gareth Lock explores the critical role of checklists in enhancing safety and reducing errors in high-risk environments like diving, surgery, and aviation. Drawing insights from Atul Gawande's The Checklist Manifesto, Gareth highlights how properly designed checklists can prevent lapses, improve communication, and establish a culture of accountability. Despite resistance from those who view checklists as unnecessary or a sign of weakness, evidence shows their ability to save live...
Apr 23, 2025•8 min
In this episode, Bart Den Ouden reflects on the importance of mastering the basics before taking on advanced challenges, using ice diving as a vivid example. During a rare opportunity for ice diving in the Netherlands, Bart observed several instructors rushing into instructor-level ice diving certifications without adequate experience. Drawing parallels with the Dunning-Kruger effect and highlighting the risks of "unknown unknowns," he emphasizes the dangers of overconfidence and taking shortcut...
Apr 19, 2025•5 min
In this episode, we explore the critical role of leadership and decision-making in diving safety, using a real-life story about a young instructor, “Jack,” who made a risky dive on a rebreather he wasn’t certified to use. Despite his confidence, Jack’s actions reflect dangerous cognitive biases like overconfidence, outcome bias, and normalization of deviance, shaped by a culture of cutting corners in his early training. Through this cautionary tale, we highlight the importance of setting the rig...
Apr 16, 2025•8 min
In this episode, we explore how listening to your inner voice can be a lifesaver, both in diving and everyday life. Bart Den Ouden shares his personal journey of uncovering severe heart issues despite passing regular diving medicals, emphasizing the importance of recognizing warning signs and overcoming cognitive biases like denial and confirmation bias. We also discuss a diver’s near-fatal experience with immersion pulmonary edema (IPO) and how quick action and a well-equipped facility saved th...
Apr 12, 2025•11 min
In this episode, we delve into risk management and decision-making in diving, exploring the difference between personal and professional responsibilities. Using a case of a divemaster tasked with guiding divers on a challenging wreck dive, we examine the complexities of managing hazards, understanding acceptable risks, and the impact of assumptions and biases. The conversation highlights the importance of preparation, critical thinking, and a proactive approach to safety, while acknowledging the...
Apr 09, 2025•12 min
In this episode, we explore the importance of preparing for failure in diving education, inspired by Hal Watts' quote: “The most dangerous thing about diving is divers themselves.” Using a real-life example from a scuba Instructor Examination, we highlight how training focused solely on passing exams can lead to complacency and poor decision-making in real-life scenarios. Diving instructors and trainers must teach students to plan for and respond to unexpected challenges safely. This involves re...
Apr 05, 2025•6 min
In this episode, we explore the dangers of "normalisation of deviance"—the gradual erosion of safety standards through repeated shortcuts—and its impact on rebreather diving and other high-risk activities. Drawing on lessons from aviation and diving, we discuss how human factors, cognitive biases, and systemic drift contribute to accidents, emphasizing that outcomes should not be the sole focus when analyzing incidents. Using models like the Swiss Cheese Model and concepts of systems thinking, w...
Apr 02, 2025•8 min
This episode dives into the critical role of human factors in safety, using a tragic aviation incident and its parallels in diving to illustrate how distractions, pressures, and systemic issues contribute to accidents. We explore how a Royal Air Force training film, "Distractions," highlighted the cumulative factors behind a hypothetical crash, emphasizing the need for shared responsibility in preventing errors. Similarly, the story of Brian Bugge's 2018 diving accident reveals the dangers of fo...
Mar 29, 2025•5 min
In this episode, a newly qualified Human Factors in Diving Instructor shares their journey of grappling with impostor syndrome and the challenges of teaching human factors to divers. Despite over a decade of diving instruction experience, they recount feeling inadequate compared to peers and doubting their knowledge, especially when students might view human factors as "common sense." Reflecting on the Dunning-Kruger effect, they explore how experts often underestimate their abilities because th...
Mar 26, 2025•3 min
