The 5 Principles of Human Performance: A contemporary updateof the building blocks of Human Performance for the new view of safety

by Todd Conklin

Conklin’s book is an interesting and informal discussion with the reader about the 5 Principles of Human Performance principle by principle, chapter by chapter. These 5 theroies about how humans perform in organiations are principles, the building blocks of Human Performance, through which we have established a new way to think about safety and reliability in our worlds. …and changing the way we think about work is a vital step towards improvement.Work never stops and work is never normal. This idea would scare a mere-mortal manager, but an enlightened leader knows the power of continuous learning and improvement. Work is constantly in motion, therefore learning must continue. Work is never the same, therefore we never really know how work is being done. If we don’t know how we perform work how will we know how we can improve?The 5 Principles of Human Performance are, in a sense, a repository of the central values of Human Performance. Keeping these principles at the core of our thinking, training, and practices will allow the basic building blocks of this philosophy to help organizational programs reduce the normal philosophical drift that is present and predictable in all safety programs. Having these espoused principles keeps us all honest and keeps our Human Performance effort on track and successful.

Genres: Business

134 pages, Paperback

Published January 23, 2019

Reviews

[Marjerie Salisse · Rating 3 out of 5]

The book is relatively easy to read and understand for the most part.
However it needs some serious editing. There are a lot of typos for a book. The author doesn’t know when to use than instead of then. Some of the typos are grammar 101. I found them distracting.
Example page 61:
The need to track and trend failure data has been a dominant force in The way we determine the difference between organizations that are considered safety and organizations that are considered unsafety.

Did you mean safe and unsafe?

Same page a little down : in practice, our events seem to be more non-linear and much more like « outliers » then repeat occurrences.

It’s more than not more then!

Page 72, that one is the best so far (there were a few in between) :
This represents information that is always available to address operational issues, identify potential problems,and to monitor and asses your organization’s capacity to manage operational upsets and negative consequences.


Who is the editor?

[Joe Kopacz · Rating 4 out of 5]

If you want a quick read about Human Performance, this is probably the quickest read of the many books written on the subject. I came to it after finding it referenced in an INPO document on the same subject.

Definitely recommend this as an entry to the subject. It is well referenced and echoes many of the other things put forth by James Reason, Sidney Dekker, Erik Hollnagel, and the like.

[Bruno · Rating 4 out of 5]

Good ready for any safety professional