Really good read. For me the best sections was the Session 1 paper by a Mr. Lee Bolman and the workshop summary by Dr. Charles Billings.
Taking a look at where it all started so to speak is enlightening when you think it went from this to the formal airline version and then to the maritime version for Bridge and finally to the engine room version. There are some simple lessons in this early starting point that seemed to have gotten overwhelmed by scope creep, minutia, or just plain poor curriculum or presentation in the early ER versions.
In the Bolman paper he proposes a “theory of the situation” (TOS) vs a “theory of practice” (TOP) concept which seems to me to be a valuable insight. Paraphrasing, mariners TOP would change little over the course of a voyage but the TOS changes continuously.
The paper is rich in simple concepts for example “espoused theory” vs “theory-in-use”. Former is the crews own explanation of their behavior if they are trying to predict what they would do. Whereas the latter is a valid theory that predicts and guides the actual actions of a crew member. I’m thinking this is where Tversky and Kahneman’s work on the biases that are at work inside our minds and allow the in-use theory to diverge from the espoused theory.
Apparently Mr. Bolman went on to bigger and better things for when googled it returns a book he co-authored called Reframing Organizations now in 6th edition. If the summaries I’ve read are reflective that would have been a good reference for ERM course.
The summary by Billings pretty accurately points out issues to watch out for in developing a resource management program - in 1979 even before people went off and developed mature programs - and amazingly some of the pitfalls were not addressed - at least not for the maritime version.
For example he addresses the instructors for such courses - they should NOT have been taken through a cookbook kind of course on how to teach resource management BUT should understand what they are talking about and that there is more than one way pf dealing with a situation.
He also remarks its “easy to become captivated by social and interpersonal issues. There’s a little bit of the psychiatrist in all of us. We’ve heard questions here, generally answered in the
negative, about whether you can change personality. Trieve suggested to me this morning that that probably is a moot point, that it probably doesn’t make a lot of difference whether you can change personality. But one thing we do know, and you people know it very well indeed because it’s one of the things you do for a living, you can change behavior. You can change behavior by making it very pleasant to behave one way and very unpleasant to behave in
another way. Incentives, positive and negative incentives.”
He also asks “are we teaching command skills or social/communication skills” which he says would govern when/where in a career you place such training.
There are also some worthwhile comments in the “calculated risk vs blind assumption” attachment by Bruggink of the NTSB.