Stay ConnectedHuman factors is a critical topic within the world of SCUBA diving, scientific diving, military diving, and commercial diving. This podcast is a mixture of interviews and ‘shorts’ which are audio versions of the weekly blog from The Human Diver.
Each month we will look to have at least one interview and one case study discussion where we look at an event in detail and how human factors and non-technical skills contributed (or prevented) it from happening in the manner it did.
Copyright: © 2023 (c) The Human Diver 2023
This episode explores how instructor decisions in diving are shaped long before an accident happens, often by habit, pressure, and past success rather than careful thought. Using real-world accounts from a fatal training dive in poor visibility, it shows how instructors often rely on fast, instinctive decision-making that usually works but can fail when conditions are complex, rushed, or risky. When dives end without incident, messy decisions often get hidden behind a “successful outcome,” which can lead to normalising higher levels of risk over time. The key message is to separate luck from skill, challenge assumptions, and judge decisions by how they made sense at the time, not just by the outcome. Simple tools like pausing to ask why you’re acting, what you expect to happen next, and whether the risk matches the benefit can slow thinking and improve safety. Reflective debriefs and open sharing of near-misses help instructors learn, adapt, and make better decisions before small issues line up into serious harm.
Original blog: https://www.thehumandiver.com/blog/top-tips-for-diving-instructors-decision-making-the-big-ones-not-the-little-ones
Links: Learning in the Heat of the Moment: An Interview With Sabrina Cohen-Hatton
Tags: - english decision-making gareth lock instructors top tips
This episode looks at a common teaching challenge: when a student can complete the required skills but still isn’t ready to be certified. Through a personal story, the author explains how the missing piece was situation awareness — the ability to notice what’s happening, understand what it means, and think ahead. The student was using so much mental effort just to manage basic skills like buoyancy and trim that there was no capacity left to track their buddy, navigation, or decompression. The key lesson is that learning and performance are limited by mental capacity, and when students are overloaded, awareness drops. Instructors can help by building basic skills slowly, watching for signs of overload, using debriefs to understand where attention was focused, sharing their own experiences, and remembering that instructors can lose awareness too. Developing situation awareness takes time, practice, and the right focus — and recognising this helps instructors support students more effectively.
Original blog: https://www.thehumandiver.com/blog/top-tips-for-instructors-situation-awareness
Tags: - english jenny lord situation awareness situational awareness
This episode explores why calling a dive can be harder in practice than the famous “any diver can end any dive” rule suggests, especially for instructors under time, money, or reputation pressure. Using a real cave-diving example, the blog shows how small equipment issues and disrupted routines created warning signs that the team wasn’t ready, even though nothing had gone seriously wrong yet. The dive was safely called, and the team later recognised how important psychological safety was in making that decision feel acceptable and supported. The key message is that psychological safety — feeling able to speak up, admit mistakes, or stop without fear of criticism — is essential for safe and effective training. Instructors play a major role in creating this by staying calm under pressure, reacting constructively to small problems, and leading by example when it’s time to call a dive.
Original blog: https://www.thehumandiver.com/blog/top-tips-for-diving-instructors-psychological-safety-and-the-thumb-rule
Links: Some previous blogs about psychological safety:
https://www.thehumandiver.com/blog/HFforD-part-10-psychological-safety
https://www.thehumandiver.com/blog/what-if-just-culture-and-psychological-safety-is-not-enough
https://www.thehumandiver.com/blog/the-challenge-of-psychological-safety
https://www.thehumandiver.com/blog/what-we-get-wrong-about-psychological-safety-in-diving
https://www.thehumandiver.com/blog/top-tips-for-beginner-divers-psychological-safety-just-culture
https://www.thehumandiver.com/blog/team-building-psych-safety-1 - Part one of a four-part series.
Tags: - english cave diving human factors lanny vogel psychological safety teamwork top tips training
This episode looks at why students — and instructors — sometimes struggle in dive training, even when the skills seem simple, and explains how performance is shaped by more than just ability. Factors like fatigue, stress, cold, time pressure, anxiety, social expectations, and difficult conditions can all affect how people think, learn, and perform. When these pressures stack up, students may panic or stall, and instructors may rush, lose patience, or make poor decisions. The key message is that good instruction means recognising these performance influences early, managing what you can, and adapting your teaching and self-care to match the situation. By slowing down, checking in, normalising mistakes, managing comfort and stress, and using thoughtful debriefs, instructors can create safer, more effective learning environments where both students and teachers perform at their best.
Original blog: https://www.thehumandiver.com/blog/top-tips-for-diving-instructors-performance-influencing-factors
Links: Blog about having difficult conversations: https://www.thehumandiver.com/blog/top-tips-for-diving-instructors-communication-the-difficult-kind
Tags: - english fatigue mike mason performance influencing factors performance shaping factors stress
This episode explores why people in diving often don’t speak up, even when something feels unsafe, and why being “heard” matters just as much as being allowed to talk. Using a real boat-diving story, it shows how authority gaps, hero culture, social media status, and tight-knit groups can silence both new and experienced divers. Research highlights that people stay quiet mainly because they fear looking bad or upsetting others, not because they lack knowledge. Titles, reputation, and tribal loyalty can make unsafe decisions hard to challenge, while weak feedback systems hide problems rather than fix them. The key message is that safety depends on leaders actively creating spaces where speaking up is worthwhile, not risky, by listening with curiosity, lowering power barriers, valuing informal conversations, and rewarding honesty over conformity. In diving, real learning starts when people feel they belong, can question decisions, and know their voice will truly be heard.
Original blog: https://www.thehumandiver.com/blog/top-tips-for-diving-instructors-leadership-creating-the-space-for-others-to-be-heard
Links: One of the studies by Reitz
Gareth’s MSc research: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DRXqeQvRFK0&t=4s
Tags: - english gareth lock instructors leadership psychological safety top tips
This episode looks at what happens when a dive “team” isn’t really functioning as a team, using a real training story where strong individual skills weren’t enough to prevent things going wrong under stress. The key lesson is that the problem wasn’t technical ability, but poor teamwork: misaligned goals, weak communication, low trust, and a lack of shared awareness. Research shows that what really makes teams perform well is not personality, confidence, or experience, but social intelligence – the ability to read others, notice stress or confusion, ask good questions, and adapt when plans change. These team skills matter just as much as buoyancy, gas planning, or drills, especially in demanding environments like technical diving. The episode explains why teamwork must be taught and practised deliberately, not assumed, and offers practical ideas for instructors and divers: train teamwork on purpose, model good team behaviour, debrief the whole team, pay attention to emotional cues, and redefine success as how well the team worked together under pressure. In short, safe and effective diving depends on strong teams, not just strong individuals.
Original blog: https://www.thehumandiver.com/blog/top-tips-for-diving-instructors-teamwork
Links: Team Players: How Social Skills Improve Team Performance study by Ben Weidmann and David Deming
More 'Top Tips for Diving Instructors' blogs
Guy’s blog about teaching teamwork: https://www.thehumandiver.com/blog/HF_Into_Archaeology
DEBrIEF model: https://www.thehumandiver.com/debrief
Tags: - english communication gareth lock instructors teamwork top tips
This episode explains why the diving industry struggles to learn from fatalities and argues that the problem is not one bad decision or one person, but the whole system. Using the death of 18-year-old diver Linnea Mills as an example, it shows how normal people, doing what made sense at the time, can be caught by gaps in training, supervision, equipment, communication, and emergency planning. The focus is on moving beyond neat, blame-based “first stories” and instead telling messier “second stories” that explore context, pressure, trade-offs, and gradual drift away from safety margins. The episode looks at ideas like normalisation of deviance, weak feedback loops, authority gradients, and the gap between what rules say should happen and what really happens on dives. The key message is that safety improves when we change conditions, not just criticise people: by building psychological safety, matching supervision to the real task, checking equipment properly, planning for emergencies that fit the location, learning from near misses, and raising standards above the bare minimum. Learning from tragedy requires courage, honest stories, and system-level change, but it is possible—and it starts before the next dive.
Original blog: https://www.thehumandiver.com/blog/we-don-t-learn-from-diving-fatalities-and-here-s-why
Links: Webinar about Linnea Mills: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lu4tc8gtNio&t=3s
No learning focused investigation process in diving: https://www.thehumandiver.com/blog/learning-reviews-in-diving
Compliance can give an illusion of safety: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VNhmxz2_adc
What conditions made it harder to do the ‘right’ thing and easier to do the ‘wrong’ thing?
Creating the conditions and space for speaking up: https://www.thehumandiver.com/blog/top-tips-for-diving-instructors-leadership-creating-the-space-for-others-to-be-heard
Having difficult conversations as an instructor: https://www.thehumandiver.com/blog/top-tips-for-diving-instructors-communication-the-difficult-kind
TEDS open question acronym: https://www.thehumandiver.com/blog/communications-ask-better-questions
Psychological safety blogs: Blog 1. Blog 2. Blog 3. Blog 4. Blog 5.
Debrief model: https://www.thehumandiver.com/debrief
Diving Talks video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VNhmxz2_adc
Child welfare changes: https://www.collaborative-safety.com/collaborative-safety-reading-packet
Tags: - english gareth lock safety safety culture system safety
Many dive instructors are facing a growing challenge: some students believe that paying for a course means they are guaranteed a certification card. This can lead to difficult conversations when an instructor decides a student needs more time to reach a safe and confident level, even if they attended all sessions and tried hard. This episode explores why clear communication is essential, especially before a course begins, so students understand that they are paying for training, not an automatic qualification. It explains the importance of describing why standards exist, using kind and supportive language, staying firm but empathetic, and normalising the idea that people learn at different speeds. By setting expectations early, explaining decisions clearly, and being honest and caring in tough moments, instructors can protect safety, maintain trust, and help students see certification as something earned through readiness, not something bought.
Original blog: https://www.thehumandiver.com/blog/top-tips-for-diving-instructors-communication-the-difficult-kind
This episode explores how the diving community responds when something goes badly wrong and why the choice between blame and learning really matters. Drawing on three university research projects, it explains that after serious incidents people look for meaning through justice, learning, and sometimes punishment, and that visible learning can itself be a form of justice. The episode looks at why divers often struggle to share honest stories about near misses and accidents, including fear of judgment, legal worries, and online criticism, and why sharing clear, context-rich stories is essential for real safety improvement. It also explains that accountability is not just about finding fault but about choosing fair, forward-looking ways to improve systems, training, and teamwork. The key message is that diving becomes safer when we replace silence and scapegoating with open storytelling, curiosity, and accountability that focuses on learning and change rather than blame.
Original blog: https://www.thehumandiver.com/blog/asking-why-telling-stories-and-owning-accountability-lessons-for-diving
Links: The three theses: Møller (2023), Lock (2024), Parris (2025)
Summary of Lock’s thesis: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DRXqeQvRFK0&t=3s
Changing the language to help learning: https://www.thehumandiver.com/blog/change-your-language-change-the-world
DEBrIEF model: https://www.thehumandiver.com/debrief
The documentaries ‘If Only…’ and ‘Just a Routine Operation’
Tags: English, Gareth Lock, Incident Reporting, Just Culture, Psychological Safety
This episode looks at how many decisions can happen during a single dive and why decision-making is often harder underwater, especially for new divers. Using a real-world wreck dive story, it shows how focus on a goal, strong currents, stress, and missed checks can slowly lead to poor outcomes, even when basic skills are sound. The discussion explains how pressure, mental overload, common thinking biases, limited experience, and social influences can affect the choices divers make without them realising it. It also introduces simple, practical tools—like clear dive plans with decision points, pausing to reassess when stressed, regular scanning of key information, and honest post-dive debriefs—to help divers recognise problems earlier and make safer decisions. The key message is that good decisions are a skill that can be learned, and every dive is a chance to improve judgment and dive more safely.
Original blog: https://www.thehumandiver.com/blog/top-tips-for-beginner-divers-decision-making
Tags: English, Beginners, Cognitive Biases, Decision Making, Gareth Lock
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