Soft systems, hard lessons

This paper is concerned with practical experiences of achieving human factors and safety interventions in the nuclear power and process control industries. It rests upon the premise that, although human factors (HF) and safety may be technological in approach, they nevertheless must operate in a socio-technical environment, within companies with corporate structures and cultures, interacting with regulatory authorities. A crucial ingredient to the successful implementation and integration of human factors into company practices and procedures is therefore the nature of the inter-relationships between human factors personnel and those who control the existing procedures determining all aspects of the design and operational processes. Such inter-relationships can largely determine whether HF is implemented or not. These human-human interactions and interfaces in a socio-technical system may be referred to as soft systems. When training in human factors, much of the training is concerned with technical aspects of the discipline. However, when entering industry or consultancy, one quickly discovers that technical aspects are usually the least of one's problems. This paper is concerned with experiences and guidance to better help the human factors professional starting out in industry. There is little scientific method in the paper. It is, instead, a distillation of this author's and others' experiences in acting either as a practitioner or consultant, or as leader of a human factors unit in industries that have at times been reluctant or even hostile about the perceived 'invasion' of human factors. However, to avoid being purely anecdotal, the experiences are placed in a framework concerned with the life cycle of integrating human factors into an industry, from being the first HF person in a company, to the development of a successful unit, or the absorption of a successful unit into other departments. Within this framework a range of strategic aspects are dealt with, such as integration of HF into the design process, and selection of test-case projects.