More Black Box Thinking

My article here , on the subject of “Black Box Thinking” and other supporting activities has now been reproduced in a number of professional journals within the EOD community, namely the C-IED Journal,  “The Detonator” (the Journal of the International Association of Bomb Technicians and Investigators), and this month will be featured in the Journal of the Institute of Explosive Engineers.

I continue to be struck be the lessons for the EOD community that can be learned from the aviation industry. One of the most high profile proponents of what Matthew Syed calls Black Box Thinking of that activity, Captain Chesley “Sully” Sullenbeger is interviewed here and it’s well worth a read.  Sully is elsewhere quoted as saying:

“Everything we know in aviation, every rule in the book, every procedure we have, we know because someone died. We have purchased at great cost, lessons bought with blood that we have to preserve as institutional knowledge.”

So, a challenge. Can we in the EOD community look in the mirror and say we have valued every drop of blood spilled by our community?  Have we wrung every lesson learned dry, examined our failures and treated them as lessons to be learned by the entire community and thus honoured their sacrifice?  Can we honour and respect those named on our memorials if we don’t bother to understand exactly the lessons they provide us? Do we, as a community, have exemplary post incident or post “near-miss” investigative procedures? Do our policies encourage the admission of errors without penalty?  Do we have the hard data to support our policy development or are we still doing it by seat-of-the-pants anecdote?  Are our rank structures and organisational frameworks road-blocking rational self examination?  Is it too difficult? Is it too much to ask?

We too have experience bought in blood, but have we valued it?