Intro workshops - practical and applied

Last month I wrote about our efforts to ‘mainstream’ the human factors research from two of our Projects – Safe Behaviour and Decision Making, and Enhancing IMT Effectiveness and Organisational Learning - by offering professional development workshops. 

In conjunction with agencies in Victoria, we have developed, trialed and refined two introductory workshops and in October conducted them in Kaipoi, New Zealand, with a group of seasonal fire fighter crew leaders.  Again, the feedback has been very positive.  Participants clearly saw that the workshops were practical and could be applied.

The participants were asked “How will you apply what you have learnt from the workshop in your work place?” Some of the responses included:

It will make me look at the management and crews in a different light and I will be more assertive if I see that I need to speak up re safety and operations

Will introduce pre-mortems

Workshops with our own crews

Will help in IC role – improve options analysis. Liked the pre-mortem process – good value in man management

Discussion with crews re options for our task at hand

Encourage teams and groups to allow time for discussing and assessing their performance

Graded assertiveness protocol

These workshops are intended as introductions only, to whet the appetite of agencies, and to open their eyes to the potential for the outputs of human factors related research to be included into their business. 

The two half‐day introductory workshops are offered at no charge to all jurisdictions within Australasia. A minimum of 15 participants (and a maximum of 30) is required. Interested agencies can read the flyer or contact me on noreen.krusel@bushfirecrc.com.

These workshops will be substantially subsidised for Bushfire CRC member agencies and will be available through to December 2012.