Safety in Action: Designing a Crew Resource Management prototype for N-USOC
Master thesis
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Date
2014Metadata
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- Institutt for psykologi [3205]
Abstract
High-risk industries are operating in an increasingly complex and dynamic environment; this leads to new perspectives on the role of the human operator in the safety management system, encouraging organizations to exploit the uniquely human capabilities of operator teams in order to maintain safe operations. Crew resource management is a popular framework for training operator teams, but has not yet been adapted to accommodate this theoretical development in any major way. Through an action research project within N-USOC, a control room supporting science missions at the International Space Station, a prototypical CRM course is developed for a distributed team working in a complex-dynamic environment, guided by theoretical analysis of safety literature and by the specific needs of the N-USOC context. Adaptive decision making strategies and skills are identified as important success factors for the human operator, along with developing team processes to increase the team capacity for managing safety margins. For N-USOC operators, building this desired adaptive expertise while learning how to manage workload and utilize domain expertise in time-critical situations is especially important. While the development of CRM training for N-USOC is not complete, the study represents a foundation to build upon for the organization, and a theoretical contribution to safety research.