Searched: "outcome bias"
Showing 85 Results:
‘They lost situation awareness… pay more attention!’ How many times have you heard this phrase to explain why an adverse event occurred? Pick any online forum that discusses a diving incident and you’ll be sure to see numerous comments describing the cause as a ‘loss of situation awareness’, acc...
I work in a medium sized dive centre in Egypt. We have about 10 members of staff in the team, including people running the counter, operating the compressor/maintaining the equipment, cleaning and instructing/guiding dives. Someone asked me the other day what I liked about working for this partic...
One of the famous decision-making models is called System 1 (fast thinking) and System 2 (slow thinking). We are able to think 'fast' because we use biases and heuristics ('rules of thumb') to make decisions. People think that biases are 'bad' but they just are. They allow us to navigate the worl...
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...
This blog is a reproduction of a cave fatality report produced by the CREER Line and Safety Committee in Mexico earlier in 2024. While it is cave-focused, there are (as always) lessons that can be taken from one domain to another. I provided some input on the HF aspects relating to this event, an...
I have been asked a number of times to comment on a 'hypothetical' event published on the RAID website on 7 August 2024 as a learning opportunity. However, it appears that the story wasn’t hypothetical, and the person involved wasn’t directly consulted about what happened. The event had a ‘bad’ o...
I ran out of gas while diving this week. As I’m still here to write this it’s fairly obvious that I’m ok, and anyone who’d been watching me at the time might not have even realised there was a problem. We tend to judge things by their outcome (a phenomenon known as “outcome bias”) and because I s...
Yesterday there was a diving fatality in Norway. I am not going to mention the name, as it isn’t public yet. When I found out about this event, my mind immediately started to think about who was involved, what might have happened, things that could or should have been done to prevent it (even tho...
I’ve been on holiday this week. I’m the kind of person who likes to do things rather than just relax, so of course this holiday has involved diving. In fact, I ended up taking a course. The main reason for taking it was to learn. That’s the reason most people take classes and it certainly applied...
SCUBA diving provides numerous opportunities for adventure and exploration beneath the waves. Be that within a flooded cave system, under the ice, or within an inland dive site like a river or quarry. However, this adventure comes with inherent (and irreducible) risks that demand respect and unde...
