Reduce the risk with risk-triggered commentary
East Midland Railway’s Richard Lavelle considers how risk-triggered commentary can help drivers build their situational awareness.
In Right Track 48, Bessie Matthews wrote about risk-triggered commentary (RTC). She reminded us that, though odd, talking to yourself can be a lifesaver.
More formally, RTC is a non-technical skills (NTS) technique that helps you focus by keeping current tasks and risks at the forefront of your attention. That’s why for a driver like Bessie saying ‘signal yellow, red ahead’ can be vital in avoiding a SPAD, for example. It’s all about helping you build and maintain situational awareness.
Dr Mica Endsley is an American engineer and a former Chief Scientist of the United States Air Force (USAF). She’s spent her whole life studying NTS and the human element in incidents. In her landmark study ‘Sources of Situation Awareness Errors in Aviation’, she identified that situational awareness (SA) is a crucial factor in effective decision-making. Dr Mica set out to understand what can influence or disrupt our situational awareness. She identified three categories:
Level 1 (failure to correctly perceive the information)
Level 2 (failure to understand the situation)
Level 3 (failure to project the situation into the future).
Of the 262 SA errors examined, 76.3% were classified as Level 1, with failure to monitor or observe available information forming the largest single category.
Armed with this study, East Midland Railway’s safety team looked at five years of our SPAD data and 12 months of TPWS incidents and applied the same SA categories. Our own results are like the aviation study, with around 70% of SPADs and TPWS incidents involving drivers failing to correctly perceive the information.
In railway terms, it means not correctly observing signals and signs, leading to drivers not fully understanding the situation and then not reacting to them in the correct way. At a basic level, this can be receiving a yellow aspect and cancelling the AWS automatically without fully observing and understanding what the indication is telling them. This then leads to inaction until TPWS intervenes or the red signal comes into view.
This type of incident happens more often than you might think. It can be affected by internal distraction from thoughts about what’s happening later in the journey, things in the driver’s personal life, or noise from inside the train. Sometimes cognitive underload can play a part as the driver doesn’t ‘snap out of it’ after a period of inactivity. Incidents will also be affected by job, workplace, and organisational factors (underlying causes).
RTC can be a vital part of the driver’s safety toolbox. It helps drivers maintain focus and better anticipate, identify, and mitigate against potential risks. But many people don’t fully understand or use it to its full potential.
In many incidents we hear that the driver said they normally use RTC but weren’t using it at the critical point it was needed. Or that they were verbalising the risk in their head. You can’t use RTC in your head, that’s just thinking about something. It only becomes RTC when you say it, and if it’s appropriate for the situation, use hand gestures too. Thoughts about what’s going on are the weakest in the working memory and most susceptible to internal and external distraction.
The scientific foundation of RTC recommends speaking aloud and using hand gestures to reinforce the risk. They won’t always both be necessary at the same time, but when you consider how many stations and signals are stopped at every day across the network, it’s not surprising drivers need something more than just observing. But verbalising the risk won’t always be enough. You need to correctly decide what to do and act on it.
This is where the Observe, Understand, Decide and Act (OUDA) model helps. OUDA sets out how we take in information, understand it, make decisions, and then take action.
Correctly observing and understanding information helps us to build situational awareness, which turn allows us to make good decisions and take the right action.
Incidents can also happen where information was observed and understood correctly, but drivers didn’t make the correct decisions or take the right action at the right time. Sometimes this can be because the driver didn’t fully appreciate the risks associated with a task.
Here’s an example. A driver has a six-car train when the normal formation on that route is four. They observe the formation correctly by looking at the train at the start of the journey. They also understand what that means for the journey ahead: that the train won’t be accommodated at some platforms and will need to be stopped further down the platform at others. All good so far. However, the driver may not appreciate that this change could lead to an error if they forget the information and drive the train as through it was a four car.
Implementing additional NTS strategies such as a stock formation flip chart, writing the formation on the diagram, and annotating station stops act as a further reminder and can be beneficial. Additionally, identifying this risk can prompt the use of RTC over short journey sections to help stop at the correct station in the right place, thus helping to build and maintain situational awareness.
Using RTC to identify the risk and keep that risk and the required action in the working memory can help build and maintain situational awareness. It can also help the driver make correct decisions and actions.
If you’re a new driver or an experienced one hoping to improve your use of RTC, do it gradually and don’t be afraid to ask for help from your driver manager teams.
Image credit: kitmasterbloke, CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons