The hardest thing to prove is the obvious!

 

Why should the community support my research project by making a donation? What is in it for you?

In a nutshell, to be part of the cultural change required to improve diving safety. When I give presentations to clubs and conferences I get an overwhelming 'Thats a no brainer!' to the outputs I am working towards. Cultural change needs support and engagement from the community and that is where you come in. This may have piqued your interested, if so, read on to learn more about how an interesting twist of fate brought some ideas together and was the genesis of this article. Twist of Fate

Two nights ago I was sat in a hotel in Brussels preparing for a meeting that I only found out about 3 days before, when I got an email from someone interested in financially supporting my research project. They said they wanted to know a little more and what I hoped to get out of my research programme. The twist of fate? They were also in Brussels at a hotel only 1 km away, visiting for a two-day meeting and going home two days later!

Opportunities

Not one to turn down an opportunity I met up with him in his hotel bar. We started chatting and he asked me some questions about my research and future plans as he could see that I appeared to be onto something. Was the aim to produce a new piece of equipment to prevent accidents from happening, or a new form of training course or training organisation to make diving safer? Maybe a software application which divers could use to plan their divers with certain parameters which would identify what might go wrong before they went diving? Outputs, and no products?!

I responded by saying that equipment in the main was very reliable and that training organisations have fairly robust training packages, so there was little that could be done other than improving the consistency in how training was delivered. The application seemed like a good idea, if only to capture incidents after the event. However, such an app would cost money to develop, deploy and manage and why would a diver buy that anyway? What is in it for them? The diving community does not have the mindset where voluntary reporting is the norm. There are already reporting systems in place but they are underused, even in mandated situations. Developing an algorithm which allows an incident to be predicted would be futile as there are so many factors at play, many of them at psychological or physiological level. Established environments have shown that it is not possible to exactly replicate the circumstances prior to an incident in a repeatable manner to see why the event occurred. The closest you can get is something like a flight simulator with 'new' pilots who are unsighted of the outcome of the incident (otherwise they have hindsight bias) and see how they react - nothing like that exists in diving and just having an instructor in the water with you will change your behaviour! So why do the research? What am I trying to achieve if there isn't a 'product' that can be monetised at the end of it? Proving the obvious!

Someone said to me the two hardest things to prove are the obvious and a negative. Everyone knows that human behaviour and performance variability are what causes incidents and accidents, it's obvious! But where is the evidence to show this in sport diving? There isn't anything that stands up to scrutiny and that is what the output of this research programme will be - a robust contribution to a growing body of evidence about human performance variability. Evidence that can be used to shape the future behaviours of divers and slowly change the safety culture in diving from the 'Pathological Level - Who cares as long as we are not caught' through the steps of 'Reactive' and 'Calculative' shown in the image below.

 

- for an explanation of these terms, click here ("Safety Culture. Theory and Practice. Hudson, 2001") Cultural Change:

However, effecting cultural change is slow - it has taken 20 years to get military aircrew to change their behaviours towards reporting and changing organisational shortcomings and that is in a structured environment. Notwithstanding this, cultural change can be influenced from the lower, individual level through activities like the presentations I give, or posting incident reports on social media to show that we ALL make mistakes, but to make more effective changes takes leadership from those inside the industry, those who are at the top, those who are respected. I fully understand the commercial imperatives and that is why cultural change in this environment is challenging. If I speak to some senior staff on an individual, unattributable level, they understand and support what I am doing, but they won't make the same statements publicly for obvious reasons. There are also a number of senior instructors I know who have left the business because they have become disillusioned with the industry. Robustness!

I am in an interesting position because I am challenging the majority of the sport diving industry on how they go about their business, and because this is a multi-million dollar industry, I need to extremely thorough, robust and defendable hence undertaking a PhD. The outputs (thesis and presentation) are the important part, not the letters after my name, that is a by-product as far as I am concerned. Fundamentally, I am not out to identify individual organisations or centres for poor performance. That would be disingenuous given the variability and complexity of the organisations, dive centres and individuals being trained and who go diving following their training. I aim to provide information and knowledge which allows individual divers to modify their behaviours, or at least be cognisant of the risks they are taking if they don't, and for training organisations, in a wider context, to understand where things are falling down so that safety can be improved. Parting Shot

I'll leave with this article with a quote which hopefully can sum up the fact that divers are a product of a system which involves training organisations, peers and friends, equipment and the environment - "Simply focusing on the ‘unsafe acts of operator’, linked to the majority of accidents, is like focusing on a fever without understanding the underlying illness that is causing it. " - Harris 2011

If you are interested in my research programme or want to support it by making a donation, please visit www.experiment.com/garethlock. There are plenty of other crowd-source funded projects there too!