Every year, hundreds of new students go through our BlueDragon workshops. These workshops include realistic case studies to highlight and reinforce the lessons taught during the course.
There is an incredible amount of valuable information in every organization that is never gathered, organized and analyzed. Information that would lead to hundreds of latent weaknesses that we inherently know exist in our policies, programs, processes and procedures. The more of these latent weaknesses that we identify and address, the fewer events and injuries we will have. And time and money that is spent dealing with latent weaknesses and their adverse consequences can be returned to mission critical tasks.
Read to de-mystify one of the biggest misconceptions in all of root cause analysis.
In 2016, global leaders from the World Economic Forum (WEF) came up with a list of the top 10 human skills that cannot be replaced by Artificial Intelligence (at least in our lifetime). Were you as surprised by this list as I was when I first saw it 4 years ago? I was especially surprised by the top two skills; “Critical Thinking” and “Complex Problem Solving,” because that is what I’ve been teaching for some years now. The basis for my complex problem solving methodology is critical thinking, and not some piece of software or application that pretends to do the hard work of critically evaluating the problem for us.
One of the more frequently discussed topics in our workshops is that we can’t really understand what we are looking for in terms of the root causes, until we know what causes events. Without that fundamental knowledge, we are likely to fall short of the target.
What does it mean to get ahead of events, and how can we do so? It means we must have a method to monitor and document performance gaps so we can tell where things are not working as well as they should; “hot spots” in the organization that are experiencing recurring issues. Once we have such as system in place, we can trend and analyze the data with the goal of early identification of negative performance trends.
We are in the 4th Industrial Revolution, the age of Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning, which is going to reshape our jobs and our education system. It would seem sensible that teaching the human skills that will not likely be replaced by AI would receive much more emphasis in education systems. However, studies show that higher education institutions have not evolved their pedagogy and andragogy to meet the increasing demands for higher order thinkers in the age of AI.
Traditionally, the process of investigating incidents, events and negative trends includes a process by which interviews are conducted. It turns out that the interview and note-taking process is one of the most inefficient, time consuming and biased aspects of a root cause analysis or other investigative process.
“Culture” is such a hard concept to grasp and even harder to evaluate. While we cannot “see” the culture of an organization, we can determine what kind of culture exists through careful observations of what we can actually see; human behaviors.
A recent article on the US Naval Institute News web site by Sam LaGrone, Editor of USNI News, grabbed my attention. It discusses a serious design flaw that is causing propulsion failures in Freedom-class Littoral Combat Ships like the USS Detroit (LCS-7) and USS Little Rock (LCS-9).
