In a TED talk in 2008, Marc Pachter claimed that the modest person makes the worst interviewee. You might think that this isn’t a problem - most of us never get interviewed, you have to be pretty important or just in the right place at the right time. Business owners are seriously missing out though if we don’t think the ‘average’ person has something of value to share. That makes the remaining 87% of people a convincing ‘average.’

There are many stories of highly talented and creative people who were never satisfied with their work.  We, the mere  mortals who admire what they produce, might never understand that. To the untrained eye there is little difference between brilliant 1.0 and  brilliant 2.0, but to them there is a world of difference. The great leveler is that both of us can describe our experience of this result.

Work design is a daily activity. In running any business, everyone who is putting effort into that business will be contributing to the overall design of the work. There will always be a minimum of two dimensions, a who - the person doing the work and / or asking for the work, and a why, the purpose of the work. Part 1 of this post was about becoming more aware of the current work design, part 2 looks at those two main dimensions, who and why.

Everyone agrees: the shift from bad, unsafe work to good safe work is important,  it's how we get there that's the challenge.  Last week I went to Erik Holnagel's workshop in Melbourne on shifting from Safety I to Safety II. The basic idea here is that safety is a limited concept in that it's only a little of the time that things go wrong - most of the time, things go things go right.  If we don't pay attention to how that is happening, how can repeat our successes?

In Australia last year Todd Sampson's appearance on the ABC programme "Improve My Brain" caught people's attention. In the programme, Sampson looked at the science behind brain performance and what could be done to increase it. There has been a real focus recently on getting better value out of our grey matter and one focus is getting smarter in business about decision making, leadership, what people do in teams... 

It makes sense that anything that might have led to a safety incident is a good starting place for prevention. The tricky thing is that there are only so many resources to fix the things we believe are our current problems, so the other, less obvious things, the ones which haven't yet caused us much grief, go low down the priority list. If we don’t pick up the near failures, how can we get to safety by design? 

Near miss reporting is really a missed opportunity for understanding the consequences of work for people and designing better work. The list of reasons above, though these can be refined further, show how many barriers we have to overcome to get better at this. I'd love to hear about case studies where there is true excellence in near miss reporting. My belief here is that even the best systems miss opportunities...

Just yesterday, I was at a client's desk, watching a tall, well groomed lady manager squirm around on her new mesh chair, yet she was quite happy to say she had huge workload, and spent long hours at work. She insisted she was otherwise fine. She didn't name what I was seeing, and there wasn't much of a connection at that time between what she thought was a minor problem and the reason I was checking out her work...

I enjoyed a very successful online meeting with some of my human factors friends a couple of days ago and it was a first-time experience using that videoconferencing format for at least a couple of the participants. Some of you out there will be spending time in teleconferences, and more recently meetings online using tools like GoToMeeting in your day-to-day work. Some of you will even be seasoned pros.

Seasoned conference goers have mastered this art. There are a couple of rules here. One is "attend all parties", another is take some time out to reboot at some stage and to keep your energy levels up. There are always expectations that we have about what we going to get out of the event, disappointment that we didn't meet certain people, or get to certain presentations. I think it's partly because we're so busy the rest of the time...

As we move around more and more,  it seems likely that some of our contact with others while away from the office is likely to be while we are in travel mode. This isn't just talking on the phone, but literally meeting more than one person at a time remotely while we are moving. One option is to refuse meeting when you are in a public space and sometimes NOT meeting is the most sensible choice, but sometimes it's worthwhile just trying to see how it goes before you pull out.

There is pressure reduce the size and floorspace of buildings. Employees still need to be continually responsive to projects, visible to other people to collaborate when necessary, yet highly productive, so it's no wonder that new ways to support people shifting between these modes are appearing. There are some job roles where people have to do very concentrated work, not just for some chunks of time during the day, but potentially all day.