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Thank you very much. We are very excited to present this workshop to you today.
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It's a bit of an experiment in and of itself. We have a vast body of knowledge to cover.
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We’ve distilled that down to what we think are the fundamentals for you as software engineers.
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As Penelope said, this is a very interactive workshop, so we're going to have you turn and chat with people in your groups.
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Then we have Daniella and Ty who will be running some microphones around at the outset.
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I wanted to start off by getting a sense of who is in the room.
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We do have to do this little dance of not getting too close to each other.
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So, is anyone here a site reliability engineer or an on-call engineer?
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Okay, well raise your hand if you've ever been on-call.
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This will work; this is going to work.
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It's fine if you haven't been on-call. That's totally cool.
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I just wanted to get a sense—do we have any marketing, product, or customer folks in the room?
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Great! We have a representative voice. Excellent!
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All right, sweet. Well, let's get into it.
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So, who are we? I am a researcher with jelly.io.
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I've been working in high-risk, high-consequence industries for most of the last 15 years.
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My interest in software came about during my doctoral program at The Ohio State University.
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I came from an industry where things were very dramatic. There was a lot of high speed, high pressure, and adventure.
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When I was first told I was working in software, I was like, 'What? Really?'
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As I started to get more involved in understanding what you all do, I realized that this is actually the quintessential occupation.
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To really understand cognitive work and to really understand what we’re going to talk about here today: joint cognitive systems.
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I’m going to pull in examples from different industries and kind of draw that through line for you.
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My name is John Allspaw. Like Laura mentioned, I became addicted—enamored—with seeing connections.
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I come from a software background with an infrastructural bent.
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In my early career, I worked in a bunch of different places.
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None of that background is particularly interesting, so I don't want to spend too much time on it.
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The point I want to get across is that workshops like this—and talks that touch on similar themes—are all part of what I'm pretty confident is a slow, but needed shift in the industry.
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What we will talk about today is so closely related to what you all experience that we sometimes don't pay much attention to it.
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I will describe that later.
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I think we should also mention that we met at Lund University in the Human Factors and Systems Safety Design program.
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I was struck by the similarities between the work I was doing and the things John was seeing in the software world.
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This was almost ten years ago, and we are both still continually learning.
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We are continually surprised by what we find when we actually look closely at people doing real work in real-world contexts.
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It’s remarkably sophisticated, and it is fascinating.
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But it is a long journey. Our goals for what we want to accomplish here today is to act as coaches.
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Just as if you spent two hours on the pitch, you might know some of the movements, you might know some of the plays, but you won't necessarily bend it like Beckham.
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So, we want to set that expectation right off the bat.
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What we are doing here is challenging some of the paradigms—some of the ways that you've been thinking about.
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How you develop technology, how you deploy it into fields of practice, how your users interact with it, and how you interact with the tools you have.
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At the end of the day, we hope you walk away with questions and a lot of interest in pursuing this further.
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This is an experiment that we see as a mission.
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We have two hours to talk about a core concept that touches every part of an entire field of engineering.
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Though it is not very well known, the bar is significantly high.
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If we do our job here, and you all are into it, you might actually leave somewhat disappointed or slightly unsatisfied.
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In that, you will want to know more because we simply can't get to it.
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Still, I believe that’s a win for us.
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One of the things I want to correct is that we are going to talk about multiple interacting fields.
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Some of which you may have heard of, and others you may not.
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We will talk about how many people in the room actually know what resilience engineering is, or have heard the term.
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Okay, how many of you have seen something on Twitter, or have heard some talks at different conferences?
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What we're going to do is break down these connections between these different fields and how they relate to software engineering.
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As we were discussing this, we thought about how to make these connections for people.
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We want to avoid getting into nerdy academic talk.
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John had a really good example.
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So, see this green bit here? This smaller circle—joint cognitive systems—is a core idea.
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Everything within the multidisciplinary field of cognitive systems engineering relates and connects to it.
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Think of it a little bit like this: if you’re familiar with the field of statistics.
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Is all of it about normal distributions, averages, mode, and median? No.
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It’s certainly a core part of it.
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It would be very weird to talk about statistics without having that as a bit of a framing.
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This workshop isn't on cognitive systems engineering because we don’t have time.
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Laura just spent a dissertation on it.
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So we’re just going to focus on this little bit.
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Does that make sense?
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We wanted to give you a bottom line upfront.
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At a very high level, these are the core concepts we will discuss.
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The first point is that all work is cognitive work.
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We will break this down a little bit more and discuss what it means to perceive change in events in your world.
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What does it mean to make sense of those changes?
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How do you assess the meaning and implications of that change as it's happening?
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The second core point is that work is always distributed across different agents.
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In the joint cognitive systems world, we will predominantly discuss how cognitive work is shared.
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This thinking involves both machine agents and human agents.
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So, when I talk about machines, I am using that interchangeably with automation or various forms of artificial intelligence.
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The level of analysis we will look at is cognitive work at this level.
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The third piece is that these machine coworkers can sometimes be unhelpful.
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They don’t always help you and can sometimes be slightly frustrating or catastrophic.
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Lastly, we can design and develop these systems of work for greater safety, productivity, and overall more resilient and robust systems.
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I think we are at a disadvantage because I didn’t manage to get the computer to make the next slides.
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So now I have no idea what’s going to come next.
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Well, we wanted this to be an interactive workshop, so we have a series of exercises.
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First, we want to understand what a joint cognitive system is.
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Imagine that it’s the end of your day.
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You know the dog has been taken for a walk, or you’ve finished dinner.
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You’re all set to settle down and go to bed.
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Then you receive an alert of some sort.
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You look at it and it looks something like this.
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I want to ask you a question, but first, I want to see if you will humor us.
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We would love to come up with two tables for a group.
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We could have one, two, three, four teams.
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I want you to spend a couple of minutes talking about this question.
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You just received this page alert.
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What do you think you would do next?
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That’s it! Yes, granted, there is lots in here.
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We want you to talk with your neighbors about what might occur to you in this hypothetical world.
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So, spend two minutes talking about anything that comes to mind.
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Sounds like you all have some ideas to discuss.
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Of course, you might be saying, 'I don’t know what the hell is happening or what the story is here.'
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How do we want to do this? We will have Daniella and Ty in the front and back.
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If you have something to say, raise your hand, and they will run over.
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What would you do next? What’s an idea that came to you?
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A brave soul in the back for the first.
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You checked for urgency? How quickly has this become a problem? How quickly is it going to become a bigger problem?
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Can I ask you just real quick, how do you check for urgency?
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Hopefully, I’ve got something that has charts showing how much free space or other issues.
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Excellent! What else? Any other ideas?
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Being a DevOps, maybe I would go back to sleep.
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Excellent! Legit! We have someone in the back.
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I would ask why we are getting this notification at 99%, not sooner.
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I’d probably recalibrate that.
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There’s never been a film where you’re like, 'Why is this not fitting?'}
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You said that historical context might matter, like if we’ve seen this alert before.
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We'd react differently depending on our history with it.
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I actually thought the same thing because now it's warning.
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We have a warning, which means this may be something we don’t care enough to do anything about.
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Or someone has been ignoring it for too long.
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So, do you just go back to bed?
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Probably.
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This is excellent! Thank you! Anyone else?
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I would probably log into Web 121 and make sure it’s not a false positive.
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Some forms of verification, yes.
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This is excellent. They all did a great job.
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So, I have a question for you.
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If this was your human colleague who phoned you up in the middle of the night and just told you this and then hung up, how happy would you be with them?
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This is fundamentally what we’re talking about.
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When we discuss joint cognitive systems, is your colleague your machine colleague performing well?
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It can be both irritating and also confusing.
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Sometimes, it's a mild inconvenience, while at other times it can be deadly.
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This stuff truly matters and increases in importance.
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As we enhance the speed and scale of critical digital infrastructure, we move more of society's core functions into the cloud.
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So, here's where we will go.
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We've already gone through one of the exercises.
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Now John is going to talk a little about how this thinking developed and give you some background.
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There are 40 years of literature and studies in high-risk, high-consequence type domains.
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That’s where we draw a lot of this theory and knowledge from.
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We will deep dive into what cognitive work is, so we can break that down a little more.
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We will do another exercise there and then explore—if we have one machine and one human.
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Is that a different interaction than multiple machines and humans?
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Spoiler alert: it is!
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Then, we’ll have you undertake a little activity.
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We want to understand how we think about distributed cognition in these types of scenarios.
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Now, I'll do an extremely abbreviated and cherry-picked history starting around World War II.
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In 1943, the US Army was like many large organizations.
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It was fashionable to think about hiring people.
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You could, in the process of hiring, work out what they were good at.
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So, you could fit the person to the job.
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At that time, the B-17, the most advanced military apparatus, was known as the 'Flying Fortress'.
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The issue in '43 was that they were crashing.
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This was not the case of being shot down or being in battle.
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They would land on runways, and about halfway down, the landing gear would retract, and they would belly flop.
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This seemed to be a significant issue, often with bombs still onboard.
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This was happening with enough frequency that the army was concerned.
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It couldn't be the planes because they were amazing.
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It had to be something about the pilots.
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I'll show you a picture of what these planes looked like.
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They brought in Alphonse Japanese, one of the first engineering psychologists.
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The army said, 'We have all the pilots here for you to interview.'
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He asked to see where they work.
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They brought him to a cockpit.
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When he arrived, he pointed out a design flaw.
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The flap control, which is what you need for slowing the plane, was installed right next to the landing gear control.
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He asked about the other planes, like the P-47.
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Its controls were in different places entirely.
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As it turned out, most accidents happened with pilots who had previously flown the P-47.
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So this helped to inform design to prevent accidents.
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To this day, you can see the distinctions in flap controls and landing gear controls.
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As a key insight, James Reason said that we can't change the human condition.
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However, we can change the conditions under which humans work. This was groundbreaking.
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This perspective enabled future studies of human factors.
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Safety can be encoded into technology.
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Accidents can be avoided with more automation.
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Procedures can be precisely specified.
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Operators need to follow the procedures to get work done.
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In aviation and nuclear power, there’s a running joke that it only takes a dog and a human to run an aircraft carrier.
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The human feeds the dog, and the dog makes sure the human doesn't touch anything.
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This notion persisted in that humans are better at certain tasks, while machines are better at others.
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This lasted until March 28, 1979, a significant date.
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Those who know about the Three Mile Island accident know how pivotal it was.
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This completely flipped our understanding of how humans make decisions.
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I won't go into the details of the accident, but it changed the game.
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Safety and cognitive work are better understood through the lens of automation.
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Automation introduces challenges and risks but is necessary.
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Rules and procedures can’t guarantee safety by themselves.
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Raise your hand if you work somewhere that has run books.
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Raise your hand if you think you could follow these procedures exactly and not have a bad time.
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Many won’t, as the procedures rarely match reality.
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Methods for risk rely heavily on human error categories, which often fail to represent how things actually are.
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Linear models of accidents, like dominoes falling, also fall short, leading to misunderstandings.
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In the mid-80s, scholars came together following the fissures revealed in Three Mile Island.
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They articulated the concept of a joint cognitive system.
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The kernel of this involves two perspectives.
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First, people using technology have a mental model of the technical system.
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They understand its functions, limitations, how it fails, and how to respond.
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In turn, the technical system also has a model of the user.
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That model dictates how well that system supports the user.
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This perspective shift is pivotal.
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This brings us to today’s landscape.
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But frankly, I have a qualm with how this is often presented.
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That's why I'm standing here; there's much legacy residue from these old models.
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As a researcher, I have many opinions about where the industry is today.
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I would like to survey you in the room about how you feel your organization handles these concepts.
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How many believe their company thinks accidents can be avoided through more automation?
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Kind of maybe a few on the fence.
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How many feel your company thinks it is necessary but also introduces new challenges?
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Great! That's inspiring to see!
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What about the idea that everything can be put in run books if documentation is up-to-date?
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I want to talk to you later.
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Remember this is your company's view, not your own.
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Rules and procedures are always underspecified.
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What about engineers having to just follow the procedures?
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Nice! Okay, a few in the back.
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As we are discussing these views, I think it’s important for us to recognize that every organization faces these gaps.
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What kinds of support do you have? It’s crucial to recognize them.
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We will begin to make the case for nurturing those gaps and opportunities.
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We want to take a look at broadening our perspectives on joint cognitive systems.
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And our understanding of the complex nature of systems, which have many inherent challenges.
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This further emphasizes the coordination needed among multiple interacting agents.
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If we already know who is engaged in this interaction, we can push others to support the system.
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It doesn’t have to bear all the load.
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One takeaway from today is recognizing the role of different agents in problem-solving.
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The collaboration of multiple actors brings numerous benefits.
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The performance of the system improves through their interactions.
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Collaboration helps bridge gaps between humans and machines.
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As we explore lessons learned from both successful and unsuccessful events, we recognize that improvement is necessary.
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Persistent gaps highlight the need for adaptive solutions.
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We can enhance cognitive dynamics in shared systems.
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To thrive, we must strategize to achieve collaborative comprehension.
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We cannot ignore the realities we face.
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Understanding the substantial nature of our challenges can lead to better outcomes.
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In articulating what we must overcome, our explanations become more joyful.
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Presenting the costs of cognitive work can help us understand its complexities.
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Being conscious of like workloads assists us in delegation.
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That awareness iteratively helps improve performance across an organization.
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In moments of uncertainty, learning about others’ experiences is vital.
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So, at the end of the day, what are some general conclusions?
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Recognizing the models we engage with in shared cognitive systems is incredibly valuable.
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You see now the importance of collaboration in the systems we engage with.
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As you move forward in your work, we encourage a newfound understanding of how to embark on problem-solving.
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Thank you, we welcome any follow-up questions or clarifications you require.
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Feel free to reach out to us regarding any concepts we covered in today’s workshop.
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Thank you once again for your participation!
