This article was first published in the February 2017 issue of Safety+Health magazine.
Sometimes a single decision can make the difference between going home safe and not. We’re good at identifying a single poor decision (for example, failure to alert the next shift of an offline pump or missing a specific step in a complicated procedure), but few understand what it takes to make a safe decision. Advances in human factors, technology and neuroscience are changing that. The challenge is understanding what safe decision making looks like and how to develop and deploy it systematically.