Learning from Success. Learning from Mistake

Not as easy as we think.

Every dive provides an opportunity to learn and improve. Often, we think that learning will happen when we have something ‘bad’ happen on the dive, looking back to see what went wrong, and then not do ‘that thing’, so the next time, the ‘bad thing’ won’t happen, and we will have a successful dive.

For example, if a diver ends a dive with a volume of gas much lower than planned, there can be many reasons for this. Often, a solution provided is along the lines of “I must pay more attention to my gas consumption” without understanding several factors that have contributed to this outcome. The outcome is seductive because it is obvious and tangible – we accept the simple solution and move on. However, consider the following questions that might unearth the factors that could have contributed to the low gas situation:

• Why couldn’t I monitor my gas as regularly as I should have been done? A check every 5 mins should show how the gas is being consumed compared to an expected consumption rate. Therefore, rather than considering ‘loss of situation awareness’, I should have considered where my attention was pointing. 
• What assumptions did I make regarding the amount of gas I’d consume on the dive? Depth. Workload. Cylinder size. Environmental conditions (current, temperature, drysuit/wetsuit, serviceable equipment not leaking gas). Were these valid assumptions? If not, why not? What did I get ‘wrong’? Was there something I could have done to validate my assumptions?
• What happened on the dive that meant the gas consumption was higher than expected? Was I deeper than planned? Was the level of effort higher than normal? Was I using a new piece of equipment? Did I extend the dive time beyond the planned because something else was going on? 

It is important that we reflect on what happened during the dive. This means we should complete a debrief even when everything goes to plan. This should be done for many reasons:

• If we only debrief a dive when something goes wrong, then if we perceive nothing went wrong, there isn’t a point in running a debrief, which means we quickly fall out of the habit of doing one, and so we don’t run a debrief.
• A ‘successful’ dive can often hide issues that show we are drifting from standards. A near-miss is often seen as a successful outcome, and so we don’t reflect on how the situation developed in the manner it did. This means we can be susceptible to the normalisation of deviance (or normalisation of risk), where we don’t realise how far we are drifting from our standards or training. Asking whether we were lucky or good and then digging into how we perceived this can help unearth issues.
  
  

A debrief can be comprehensive, like the one I have produced and can be downloaded for free from here (www.thehumandiver.com/debrief), or we can take a couple of simple approaches that focus on the individual or the task:

• Individual focus: One thing I do well? One thing I need to do more of? One thing I need to do less of? This sort of debrief is ideal between a pair of divers or between instructor and student. Suppose this is going to take place between instructor and student. In that case, the instructor should initiate the request to generate psychological safety; if it is full of platitudes, they should dig deeper.
• Task focus: What did we do well? Why did it go well? What do we need to improve? How will we do that? The most important questions are: why did it go well, and how will we improve? Observations are easy; change isn’t!!
  
  

It is important that when a debrief is run; we focus on the specific details so that learning can happen. For example, “The team communication was good” could be a positive feedback piece. Still, this general statement doesn’t help us replicate the positive outcome because this outcome will be associated with effective skills or behaviours. A much better response would be, “When we checked understanding at the end of the debrief, we used “Tell me what you’re expecting to see”, an open question, which highlighted some gaps in the knowledge within the team. A closed question like “Did everyone understand that?” wouldn’t have likely exposed that gap.”

Learning from mistakes can be socially awkward too. There are often social pressures that prevent us from talking about the issues we faced on the dive, and so “What happens underwater stays underwater…”. Initial research by the author has shown that divers will share stories within a closed group but not wider because there isn’t a high level of trust that the stories will be used for positive purposes. Rather there is a perception that someone will make fun of for making an ‘obvious’ mistake or behaviour. If it were that ‘obvious’, don’t you think the individuals involved would have noticed it? Shifting this approach requires developing a psychologically-safe environment and a Just Culture. Details about these concepts can be found here (Psych Safety for Dummies, Just Culture for Dummies).

Unfortunately, our ability to learn is impacted by cognitive biases which shut the learning opportunities down:

• Outcome bias. We look at the quality of the outcome rather than the quality of the decision-making before the outcome. We can have a ‘good outcome’ without realising there was a train wreck behind us.
• Fundamental Attribution Error or Bias. This is where we focus on the individual’s dispositional factors (how we perceive them to be as a person) rather than the situational factors (what was going on around them at the time, i.e., the context). Our behaviour is influenced and shaped by our context.
• Hindsight bias. We look at an event after the fact and judge its likelihood as more likely than those who were involved at the time. This means we often focus on ‘obvious’ critical factors, but these were considered ‘weak’ signals by the divers in the incident or accident.
  
  

These biases are normal and expected. But that doesn’t mean we have to fall foul of them. Reflect on your own behaviours when reviewing an incident report or social media post.

Summary
Learning happens when we do something, reflect on it, put some changes in place that should address the gap in our previous performance, and then try it out the next time to see what happens. And then, we reflect on that action to see if the change made a difference. This process requires effort, and because improvements often take time, we can lose enthusiasm trying to improve when we don’t get the immediate change or response we were expecting. Unfortunately, divers tend to buy ‘shiny’ stuff to solve their issues as they believe a technological solution will solve them.

What solves most problems is an approach that involves reflecting on the decisions and actions on the dive and how it made sense to do what was done. This is not easy. No one likes to think that they aren’t very good at something. We must also recognise that there are no magic bullets to improving our performance on a dive. Trim, buoyancy, gas consumption, propulsion, situation awareness, leadership, communications, photography, videography, and line-laying in a cave/wreck… all require practice combined with critical feedback and reflection. Sharing mistakes (and successes) is essential if we are to improve. We will never make all the mistakes ourselves, so why not learn from others, looking for similarities, not differences, when accounts are told?