What Is The Safety Spectrum?
The Safety Spectrum
Meaningful safety is a spectrum of learning events.
Organizations that track task level, learning events (successes, mistakes and near misses) to iteratively refine human & organizational performance (HOP) are able to repeatedly execute dangerous operations with a high level of reliability. For example, landing a plane is a dangerous operation and yet every day in the United States there are over 40,000 sucessful landings. This is because the aviation industry as a whole learns from every task level, learning event and turns that spectrum of experience into industry wide knowledge in order to maintain its higly reliable record of aircraft landings.The Safety Spectrum is made up of safety elements that help organizations to create safe work places. These elements are essentially perishable knowledge that is learned and stored by organizations in many forms including memories and documents. Using video a Safety Professional can more efficiently capture accurate safety and technical knowledge into their SafetySpectrum community of practice (CoP). Currently Safety Spectrum has two elements: Journals and Hazards.
In summary SafetySpectrum makes it easy for a Safety Professional to use Apple mobile devices to efficiently and accurately capture perishable safety and technical knowledge into the SafetySpectrum cloud where it is geographically mapped into a visual Safety Spectrum for secure collaboration with privacy.
Events | Hazards | Journals
<— More [Experience] Less—>
SafetySpectrum stores the safety elements as videos because using an Apple mobile device to capture live knowledge when something new has just been learned is easier and more accurate than trying to write it down. For existing written materials, the visual and audio of video augments reading to create multimodal learning which greatly enhances and accelerates knowledge transfer. Video media is superior for the asynchronous transfer of knowledge at scale to remote locations relative to inefficient, "one-time" live face to face sessions.
While written media is better for experts, video media is better for novices, especially when learning new "physical" processes (e.g. how to tie a bowline knot) because they can replay the video over and over to start developing "muscle memory" and an accurate mental model to navigate the physics of the task. Video media is not only efficient with knowledge transfer but it can transfer intangibles like positive re-enforcement which is critical to creating a safety culture. Video media easily transfers "leading by example" since the person in the video can be seen as opposed to reading about.
Perhaps the best part of video media is that it can help to prevent and in some cases correct skewed "mental models". When a person makes a decision they are making a rational agent decision using thier mental model of learned behavior and experience. In thier "mind's eye" the person is assessing the physics of the situation they are in and using cause and effect history that they have learned over time from experience. Written media are highly prone to creating skewed mental models, especially if the person reading the written media is not familiar with pre-requisite knowledge or has never actually executed the physical task they are reading about. Video media is superior at transferring mental models because video media is a more efficient way to "show" the physics and inner workings of a situation relative to adding illustrations and pictures to written media.