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This blog follows on from the blog yesterday (26 Nov 25) about the practical steps you can put in place, so that Non-Technical Skills (NTS)/Human Factors in Diving (HFiD) become core elements of your diving, be that at an individual/team level or at a dive centre/club or organisational level. Th...
We often hear that 'experience is the best teacher.' In diving, much like in aviation, it’s common to equate years under the water, or the number of logged dives, with competence. We assume a diver with hundreds of dives is automatically more capable than someone fresh out of training. But what i...
Divers and instructors don’t learn because it requires investment and change, and that is hard. Organisations don’t learn because the operational or 'local' safety problem is not theirs. This blog summarises the free webinar I gave earlier this year, which looks at the death of 18-year-old diver...
There’s a growing challenge being experienced by dive instructors. It’s not about air sharing, buoyancy, or navigation. It’s about expectation management – specifically, the increasing trend where students believe that when they buy a dive course, they’re buying the certification card and associ...
When a diver dies or something goes badly wrong underwater, the same questions bubble to the surface: Why did this happen? Who is responsible? Could it have been prevented? Those questions are human. They stem from a need to make sense of tragedy, to restore trust, and to reassure ourselves that...
Psychological safety appears to have become a buzzword in diving, cropping up in social media, team debriefs, and conversations around leadership and performance. That is encouraging and great to see, because changing the language can change the world. However, popularity also breeds assumptions,...
Diving is often described as a “safe” sport—relaxing, fun, and open to anyone who can pass a basic training course. Yet this simplicity is deceptive. True safety is not just the absence of accidents and incidents, but the active presence of barriers, defences, and a culture that supports learning...
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...
Two weeks ago, I wrote a blog about the (in)ability to learn from near-misses because they are often treated as successes. Furthermore, the research behind the article also showed that those in leadership positions of organisations are rewarded for near-misses because the positive outcome contrib...
A recent discussion about risk management in a remote diving location where a diver had suspected DCI is the prompt for this blog. While it was prompted by a remote location, the principles are applicable to all the diving we do. The first part of risk management is understanding and recognising...
