Take a Second Look
The Human Error Think-Shop — experience first-hand the simplicities and complexities of human error, and how easy it is to go the wrong way.
"Human error" is the most common phrase found in accident investigations worldwide. It is also the most poorly understood. If we are going to continue blaming human error for the failures of complex systems, we owe it to the people inside those systems to understand where error actually comes from — and what we can do about it.
What Participants Leave With
By the time participants leave on Day Two they will never think about human error in the same way again. They leave with a precise understanding of why humans make errors — not because they are careless or incompetent, but because the environments we design, the pressures we apply, and the cognitive limitations we all share make error not just possible but inevitable. More importantly, they leave knowing exactly what to do about it — at the individual level, the team level, and the organisational level.
Who Should Attend
Take a Second Look© is designed for anyone whose decisions, actions, or oversights could contribute to a system failure — which, in any high-risk organisation, means almost everyone.
It is particularly powerful for managers, supervisors, engineers, and safety professionals involved in the design, operation, modification, or maintenance of plant or processes, and for senior leaders who want to move their organisation beyond compliance toward a genuinely error-aware culture.
Take a Second Look© has been delivered across Australia, New Zealand, China, Malaysia, Saudi Arabia, India, and Egypt — in mining, petrochemicals, aviation, construction, defence, and emergency services.
The maximum program size is twenty participants. The minimum is ten.
What is the Take a Second Look Think-Shop?
Most safety programs treat human error as the end of the investigation. Take a Second Look© treats it as the beginning.
The Chartered Institute of Ergonomics and Human Factors confirms that "human error" appears in almost every accident investigation ever conducted. Yet despite its ubiquity, it remains one of the least understood concepts in safety — invoked as an explanation when it is actually a question. Why did the human err? What conditions made that error likely? What could have been done to prevent it?
Take a Second Look© answers those questions — not through lecture or theory alone, but through direct experience. Participants encounter error themselves, in real time, under controlled conditions, and then explore the cognitive, perceptual, and environmental factors that created it. The result is an understanding of human error that is visceral, practical, and permanent.
The program is grounded in three interconnected disciplines: Visual Perception — why we see what we see and why we fail to see what is right in front of us; Situational Awareness — how we make sense of what we perceive and apply it to safety decision-making; and Projection — how we integrate perception and awareness to predict how we and our environment will come together in the near future, and why that prediction so often fails us.
The Program — Day by Day
Day One
The Architecture of Error
Day One establishes the foundation — not by telling participants about human error, but by having them experience it.
The morning introduces the science of Human Factors Engineering and the ten major categories of human error — from attentional limitations and memory constraints to automaticity, confirmation bias, and the availability heuristic. Participants don't just learn these categories — they encounter them directly through structured exercises and simulations that reveal, sometimes uncomfortably, how predictably the human mind can be led astray.
The centrepiece of Day One is the Stroop Effect demonstration — a deceptively simple exercise that exposes the cognitive interference between automatic and effortful processing, and opens the door to a deeper understanding of why experienced, motivated, competent people make errors that seem inexplicable after the fact.
The afternoon moves into Situational Awareness — how we collect, process, and apply environmental information in real time, and why the gaps in that process are so often invisible until something goes wrong.
Day One closes with individual reflection: participants identify the specific error-prone conditions that exist in their own workplace — and begin to see them clearly, perhaps for the first time.
Day Two
From Error to Reliability
Day Two moves from understanding error to building reliability.
The morning introduces Human Reliability — the systematic application of what we know about human error to the design of environments, systems, and processes that minimise its consequences. Participants explore what individuals can do to reduce their own error exposure, what organisations can do to design error out of their systems, and where the lower limits of human error control actually lie.
The afternoon brings High Reliability Organizing into focus — how organisations that operate most safely under the most demanding conditions approach human fallibility, and what Collective Mindfulness looks like in practice on the floor of a high-risk workplace.
Day Two closes with each participant developing a targeted action plan — specific, measurable interventions for reducing error-prone conditions in their own workplace — presented to the group and refined through peer feedback before participants leave.
What Participants Leave With
SAFE-T-LEADER© is designed for leaders who are serious about safety — not as a metric to be managed, but as a value to be lived.
It is suitable for:
- Senior executives and board members
- Safety managers and HSE professionals
- Operations and site managers
- Team leaders and supervisors in high-risk environments
It is equally powerful for participants from any high-risk industry — mining, petrochemicals, aviation, construction, defence, emergency services, and healthcare.
The maximum program size is fifteen participants. This is deliberate. SAFE-T-LEADER© is not a conference — it is an intensive developmental experience that requires every participant to be seen, challenged, and developed as an individual.
Delivery and Support
Take a Second Look© is delivered over two consecutive full days. Every program begins with a pre-program consultation — David G Broadbent works directly with the sponsoring organisation to identify specific error-prone conditions, cultural context, and participant needs before Day One begins.
Following the program a post-program review is provided to sponsoring leadership, identifying the key error-prone conditions and the specific interventions recommended to address them.
Facilitator
Take a Second Look© is designed and facilitated exclusively by David G Broadbent — internationally recognised Safety Psychologist, creator of the Transformational Safety® System, and one of the world's foremost practitioners in the application of Human Factors science to safety leadership and culture.
Past participants have described Take a Second Look© as the first time anyone has made sense of accident causation for them. David's ability to make complex science viscerally real — through demonstration, experience, and his own deep knowledge of what error looks like in operational environments — is what makes this program unlike anything else available in the safety training market.
Every accident investigation in history has concluded with the same two words — human error. Yet in thirty years of safety practice, I have never met a single person who came to work intending to make one. The question was never whether humans would err. The question was always whether we had designed environments, systems, and cultures that made error inevitable — and then had the audacity to blame the human when it happened. Take a Second Look© changes the question.
Day One — The Leader in the Mirror
- Welcome, program overview and participant introductions
- The Full Range Leadership® Model — from The Invisible Man to The Missionary
- The nine TSL constructs — identifying my dominant constructs and leadership gaps
- ATLAS© Pillar 1: Who Am I?
- ATLAS© Pillar 2: What Drives Me?
- ATLAS© Pillar 3: My Emotional Intelligence
- ATLAS© Pillar 4: My Leadership Strengths
- ATLAS© Pillar 5: My Leadership Challenges
- ATLAS© Pillar 6: My Capacity to Absorb Change
- ATLAS© Pillar 7: My Implementation Skills
- Day One reflection and individual journaling
Day Two — The Leader in Action
- Day One recap and overnight reflections
- Transformational Communication — theory and demonstration
- Transformational Communication — intensive practice and debrief
- Psychological Safety as the force multiplier
- Anatomies of Disaster — leadership failure in a major industrial disaster
- Anatomies of Disaster — continued analysis and group debrief
- Day Two reflection and leadership commitment statements
Day Three — The Leader Who Builds Culture
- Day Two recap and overnight reflections
- High Reliability Organizing — the five HRO hallmarks and Collective Mindfulness
- Mapping your organisation against the TSL Culture Maturity Framework
- Individual 90-day implementation planning
- Small group presentations and peer feedback
- Program debrief and graduation