Change your Language. Change the World

- english cognitive biases communication gareth lock incident analysis incident reporting Jan 07, 2025

The title might be a little ambitious but changing our language can make a huge difference to how we improve diving safety.

Think about the following statements:

  • The diver ran out of gas on the dive.
  • The gas ran out while the diver was on their dive.

What are your first thoughts regarding the top statement? What was the 'cause' of the event? Where is your focus? Now consider the second event, which is the same situation but the emphasis is slightly different. Where is your focus now? What questions would you consider asking?  

In the first statement, the focus is on the diver, and as a consequence, it is easy to focus on their actions or inactions (complacency, poor planning, 'excessive' or unexpected breathing rates), and how the event occurred. However, in the second example, the focus is on the gas and our thoughts open up to more potential conditions that led to the gas running out. 

Simplifying this - "What caused the gas to run out?" compared to "Why did the diver run out of gas?"

Isn't this just semantics?

This might appear to be semantics and arguing over nuanced detail. However, language is how we make sense of the world. Another example of what happens when we change the language used.

  • The red car smashed into the blue car at the traffic lights.
  • The red car hit the blue car at the traffic lights.

Research shows that the first statement creates a more graphic and energetic image in people's recollection of the event, with potentially glass lying around and maybe people injured, whereas the second might be a dent and some scratches. (Hidden Brain - Are Our Memories Real? podcast)

Now think about how adverse events are described in the media and social media.

  • A moment that changed me: a scuba dive gone horribly wrong taught me the dangers of complacency
  • Missed pre-dive safety check led to Scapa Flow diver's death.
  • The death of a man who drowned while on a scuba diving trip could have been prevented if appropriate equipment checks had taken place.
  • This Girl is Crushed by Her Drysuit
  • The Tragic and Un-Necessary Death of Brian Bugge

The language above has a purpose: to grab the attention of those scrolling through social media and forums and draw them in - when attention is limited, we have to make the message shout out. The words are emotive and often judgemental, and importantly, rarely contribute to learning. Human nature tends to lead us to blame others for events without considering the context. This is known as the fundamental attribution bias. This bias is where we focus on the individual's behaviour and their dispositional nature, rather than the context and situational factors.

Because we communicate so often and the language we use is so common, we take it for granted that when we communicate with others, they understand what we intend to achieve. This includes the subtleties and nuances that we just 'accept' as normal. In 'normal' life, like buying ice cream, ordering food or speaking with our family, this sort of simple, and potentially ambiguous, communication isn't an issue, but in a safety-critical environment where precision is important, or if we want to extract the maximum amount of learning from an adverse event (or an exceptionally good one), we need to change the language we use.

Improve your English, Change your Life.

Examples of changing the language

Examples of what you can do to shift the language to one more focused on learning rather than judging or blaming.   

  • Agency... While people have 'agency', move your perspective from the person to the context. e.g., the diver ran out of gas on the dive >> the gas ran out on the dive. The latter leads to questions about how it made sense, the former focuses on the diver. Here is a complete blog on the topic of agency.
  • Incident/Accident... Event. This reduces biases and normalises the variability in our actions - it is an 'event' not something special.
  • Audit/Investigation... Learning Teams/Learning Event. People don't like to be investigated, but most people want to contribute to learning. You can find out about Learning Reviews here.
  • Why did it happen?... How did it make sense? Exploring the local rationality of those involved brings a much richer understanding than asking 'Why', as why often ends up focusing on the individual and not their actions. There is a podcast run by Gareth Lock that focuses on exactly this topic.
  • Normative language... Over… Improper… Inadequate… We are comparing against an arbitrary standard. For example, what is the difference between confidence and overconfidence? Outcome...
  • Violation/Non-compliance... Adapted or modified procedure, or local ingenuity. Adaptations are normal to get activities done. The task is nearly always underspecified, and so humans fill the gap. If we call it a violation or non-compliance, we are not likely to hear about the drift that is occurring and is normal.
  • Counterfactuals (should have, could have, failed to...)... Look to understand how it made sense. e.g., the diver failed to monitor their depth and decompression obligation. What conditions made this more likely? What distractions were present? Was their training and learning retention sufficient?
     

Summary

Change is hard, especially when we don't see a benefit to the change. If we view the world through the same lens (the errant and 'stupid' people are the things to fix), rather than understanding the context that they are diving/instructing in (dealing with conflicts, ambiguities, assumptions, and unclear situations), then nothing is going to change in terms of diving safety and diving performance. We can start the change by reframing and modifying the language we use to describe events and situations. 

 

Links worth exploring: 

How language changes the way we think - TEDTalk

The Power and Pitfalls of Language in Accident Investigation

The Power Of Language

 


 
Gareth Lock is the owner of The Human Diver, a niche company focused on educating and developing divers, instructors and related teams to be high-performing. If you'd like to deepen your diving experience, consider taking the online introduction course which will change your attitude towards diving because safety is your perception, visit the website.