How do human factors influence an inherently risky activity like scuba diving?

That’s what my guest on this episode, Gareth Lock explores in his work as the founder of The Human Diver — a company that specialises in teaching the diving community about human factors.

Whether you’ve ever been diving or not, it's fairly obvious that it’s an activity, that comes with a degree of inherent risk. After all, It involves getting into an environment that requires us to use specialist equipment because being underwater impacts our ability to breathe naturally and diminishes the use of some of our senses. It also exposes us to some potentially dangerous conditions - temperature, currents and air pressure for starters. Not to mention the sea creatures we might come across, who aren’t necessarily always going to welcome our intrusion into their world.

As Gareth explains in our discussion, those dynamics can be made far worse by humans. Most accidents and incidents in diving arent down to technical failures, rather they are down to complacency, breakdowns in communication, poor decision-making, a lack of situational awareness or ineffective teamwork and/or leadership.


To find out more about:

Gareth - https://www.thehumandiver.com/theteam

The Human Diver - https://www.thehumandiver.com/

Under Pressure, Gareth’s book - https://www.thehumandiver.com/underpressure

The Human Factors in Diving Conference - https://www.hf-in-diving-conference.com/

In our discussion, we also refer to Tim Harford. You can hear the episode of this podcast featuring Tim here: https://www.podpage.com/the-human-risk-podcast/tim-harford-on-using-data-to-make-smarter-decisions/

Listeners interested in hearing more about Human Factors will enjoy this episode of the show featuring Neil Clark: https://www.humanriskpodcast.com/neil-clark-on-human-factors/