Enhancing safety performance: Non-Technical skills and a modicum of chronic unease

Abstract

Current debates on professionalism and safety cover a range of interpretative challenges and theoretical perspectives, as the workshop organized by FonCSI in 2015 revealed. One avenue for consideration was to address the question of the role of professionalism in the job with regard to safety. For example, should safety training just be part of normal job training or should it have a separate and distinctive position in the training curriculum? In this paper, I consider two ways in which safety training and safety thinking are being integrated into routine managerial and technical work. The first of these is behavioural, namely to focus on the non-technical skills (NTS) for a given job, as evidenced by the airlines’ Crew Resource Management training and assessment programmes. This approach is now being adopted in other safety-critical sectors, such as acute medicine and offshore oil and gas operations. The second direction is more attitudinal in nature: it examines the relatively novel concept of chronic unease, derived from the High Reliability Organisation literature. These two approaches show that addressing both workplace behaviours (non-technical skills) and underlying attitudes to operational risks (chronic unease), can help to build protective skills for safety into the professional job repertoire.