Better Words, Concepts and Models – Better Safety

During school cadet under-officers courses, we were taught “First tell them what you are going to tell them, then tell them, then tell them what you have told them.” This injunction embodies the psychology research findings on the importance of primacy and recency in recall.

Communities and scientists alike are led astray by their bias produced by their history. Also as a result of their pattern seeking and story telling propensity, they can fail to see things which are in plain view. One of the limited varieties of canonical (which leads us to cram the real and messy complexity of life into simplistic channels. Typically in safety, this leads to the identification of “cause” error) and consigns to oblivion many essential factors, high in controllability.

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