Human Factors - Learning from Normal Work

For years, safety professionals have been learning lessons about what contributed to incidents only after they occurred. Although this resulted in many improvements, waiting for an incident to happen to learn from it, limits our ability to prevent incidents. The “Learning from Normal Work” culture transformation toolkit offers a new perspective and a set of practical tools on learning about the precursors of incidents when nothing goes wrong. By exploring how people complete the work by adapting to varying challenges and conditions (i.e., learning from everyday work), we can find ways to introduce more effective controls and reduce risk.

Learning from normal work is about proactively looking into things that make the work difficult before they contribute to incidents. The idea of learning from normal work is based on the following principles:

• Things go wrong for mostly the same reasons as things go right.
• There are a number of constraints which affect how people do work.
• Work is always variable and people must be allowed to adapt in order to get work done successfully.
• People carry out work as they do because it makes sense at the time in the context which they are faced with.
• Work as imagined (in a plan or procedure for example) is never the same as work in reality.