The Story We Get Told Vs. What Really Happened

BY GARETH LOCK

Bio: Gareth Lock has been involved in highrisk work since 1989. He spent 25 years in the Royal Air Force in various front-line operational, research and development, and systems engineering roles, giving him a unique perspective. In 2005, he started his dive training with GUE and is now an advanced trimix diver (Tech 2) and JJ-CCR Normoxic trimix diver. In 2016, he formed The Human Diver intending to bring his operational, human factors, and systems thinking to dive safety. Since then, he has trained more than 500 people face-to-face around the globe, taught nearly 2,000 people via online programmes, sold more than 4,000 copies of his book Under Pressure: Diving Deeper with Human Factors, and produced "If Only…," a documentary about a fatal dive told through the lens of Human Factors and a Just Culture.

Hearing stories is how we learn. Over the millennia, we have learned to know what is right or wrong, good or bad, or a successful outcome or one of failure, through the telling of stories Good stories tell a narrative, and great stories elicit an emotional response The more emotion we feel, the more 'sticky' the story is to our memory Improving your memory isn't just about recall; it is also about how the memory was encoded, making the information easier to find when needed Finding the lesson of a story at the right time is critical in diving Answering questions during the exam at the end of your diving course is helpful to test recall However, how well does the score on a test correspond to successfully recalling the knowledge when you actually need it?

"We only know what we know when we need to know it " – Dave Snowden

Our knowledge is incredibly contextual, and how and when we use it is triggered by the cues and clues we see, hear, feel, taste and smell Once we have sensed these cues, we match them to previous experiences and execute an action

Sometimes these patterns are not what we expect, and we make a 'bad decision'. We only know whether a decision is flawed by its consequences, making it a bit like writing the test before taking the course. If we 'knew' it was bad, we wouldn't do it. The more experience we have, the more mental models we have, which allows us to make the 'best' decision. We are 'satisficing' – it is good enough for the situation we are in – Captain Sullenberger landing on the Hudson River is a classic example of this, given the limited options and time he had. To learn from an event, we must understand the context; otherwise, our knowledge is essentially a piece of the jigsaw puzzle that doesn't fit.

For example, does it matter that divers follow a guide into a wreck and start to explore it? They know the guide is experienced, has dived these wrecks before, and everything looks OK. There isn't a perceived risk because there is no percolation of rust particles, and the divers have good finning techniques to ensure the silt doesn't get stirred up. But what if this isn't the case?

The environment remains the same, and there still isn't a line laid by the guide so that they can find their way back out, but in this case, the divers kick up the silt, and the visibility is reduced to zero in some places – all unknown to the guide The divers never learnt great siltlimiting finning techniques, as they have no consequence in open water Now, however, they are stuck in a wreck without a line and with zero visibility In hindsight, it is obvious to see the knowledge failure in THAT situation Context is king!

Ultimately, we want to make 'good' decisions –find that part of the wreck or reef we've heard about, or that elusive fish or nudibranch to take a photo of, or explore a new section of a cave Diving involves many variables If everything was guaranteed and certain, it wouldn't be as exciting or enjoyable!

However, uncertainties also mean things may go wrong. Learning from mistakes is a powerful training tool. However, we can't afford to make every possible mistake ourselves – partly because we don't have the time and partly because we might not survive them! Therefore, sharing near-miss stories, i.e., stories with a rich context and vividly depict the events' conditions, increase the likelihood that they will be 'sticky'. Then we can pull the relevant, important information when we need it on a dive. So, while learning from your own mistakes is not without merit, learning from others is much better!

These context-rich stories are sometimes known as 'second stories'. First, stories are told from the perspective of proximal causes; those causes are closest in time and space to the event Still, most adverse events have their genesis further back in time This long gestation period means multiple, different causal roots, all coming together at just the wrong time/space for an incident or accident to happen These second stories explain the conflicts and tensions that exist: time pressures, money pressures, incomplete diver instruction, poorly designed equipment poorly maintained or serviced equ excessive noise, sea-sickness, changes, visibility & current changes these factors provide a context describes the difference between wha happen and what did happen On occasions, some of these conditions w been present There was a su outcome, and as such, we don't recog significance of that information unless an effective post-dive debrief to re what went well and why, what improvement, and how.

Apart from individual learning, we ca stories with other divers in the comm agencies like Divers Alert Network, o media like the Human Factors in Di Group, to help others learn. Howe every diver has a learning attitude towards near-misses and adverse events. Instead of focusing on learning, they focus on blaming and what was done wrong (the first story) without taking the time to understand the second story. The only way we can change this is through role-modelling by leaders in the community. This doesn't have to be done by leaders with a title, but by leaders who are willing to make a change in the industry, who are eager and have the courage to talk about being human, making mistakes, and explaining the context. The explanation is not 'an excuse'. Instead, it is about explaining the 'local rationality' – how it made sense for someone to do what they did at the time, given THEIR knowledge, skills, resources, and constraints. Not those of the observer…the observer's story always seems more evident because the dots can be joined at leisure Still, it is usually incomplete, omits the context and subjective experience of those involved and is therefore frequently biased or unrealistic.

Be curious, not judgemental, because if you are, you might discover the story that really happened, not just the one you were told.