So I was watching Sully on the weekend (a movie about the pilot who landed the plane in the Hudson River in NY). Right at the end of the movie, there’s a part where Sully and his co-pilot are at the hearing which is determining whether they made the right call or not. Spoiler Alert… please stop reading if you want to watch the movie!!
So, they prove that the pilots in the simulators could have made the two nearest airports, but Sully asks the question, how many times did the pilots train to make the landing? It turns out it was 17 times. He says that taking out the human factor - that is, time to analyse what was going on and make a decision and being directed what to do, meant that the pilots, after 17 tries could make the airport. So they put in a 35 second delay for the ‘human factor’ and it clearly showed they wouldn’t have made it and Sully was in fact a hero.
It got me thinking about our processes and systems and how we’re making sure that we take into account the human factor. How we make processes simple and train our people so they’d make good decisions in crisis situations. Who’s doing what in this space? How do you analyse whether your processes/systems/checklists are actually any good? How often do you look at them? I want to throw out everything I ‘know’ and start again.