The well-known imperative "Pay more attention to what you do!", So often motivated by human error, is sad evidence of a lack of understanding of how our "control center" works. If we believe that error prevention depends only on how or how much we focus our conscious attention when executing work, we are on the wrong path.
A culture of excellence can only be built from an understanding of the psychobiological characteristics that condition our performance. Many times we give orders and impose procedures whose mental logic puts our team on the brink of failure, because we do not notice that the brain follows its own operating principles, developed through a long evolution, which will not change just because some boss decides. It is necessary that we understand them as far as possible and that we design the tasks according to their characteristics, in order to ensure the desired results.
For example, since 1956 it has been known, thanks to the contribution of the American psychologist George Miller, that our capacity for conscious attention is limited to a total of seven pieces ("chunks") of information on average. These elements may be constituted by the variables of a problem that we are analyzing, by the sensory data of a task that we are carrying out and by other stimuli that affect us, such as the conversation of a colleague, the noise of an accident on the street or the cup of hot coffee in our hands. But there are some other reasons why using conscious, sustained memory, or short-term attentionIt is very inefficient for performing repetitive tasks that must be completed quickly and without error. Among them I highlight:
• keeping our attention focused on the elements that allow us to correctly perform the task, consumes a significant amount of energy.
• fatigue produces a relaxation of energy tension that allows the incidence of unwanted sensory stimuli, which displace useful informational elements, generating forgetfulness and errors.
• If the task requires considering an amount of data that exceeds the capacity of our short-term memory, the brain applies a random selectivity that eliminates the excess amount indiscriminately.
• rational information processing is several times slower than subliminal, due to the greater number of neural circuits it involves.
It is the youngest function of the brain, even immature and without certain possibilities to compete with the oldest, which almost always take the lead. A tool with this restricted scope and such a high energy cost deserves to be used for very specific tasks that really require it, such as planning, analysis or diagnosis activities, to name just a few. For the others, it is necessary to seek alternatives that do not become the organization's bottleneck, fortunately we have several. The implicit or procedural memory is what I want to present at this time.
And if we talk about this memory we must, necessarily, refer to the learning process - the one through which we pass from unconscious ignorance (we do not know that we do not know), through conscious ignorance (we warn that we do not know), conscious knowledge (we understand and do only from working memory (and therefore slowly and clumsily), to finally arrive at unconscious knowledge, that state in which skills have been automated to the point where we no longer have to think about what what do we do. Consequently, the conscious capacity to attend to possible process anomalies that require unscheduled intervention or the execution of previously agreed contingency plans has been released.
For this to happen it is necessary to ensure that:
1. The design of the process is logical and ergonomic, in such a way that the actions can be carried out continuously, fluidly and with the least possible fatigue.
2. The risks and critical control points have been analyzed in order to design appropriate contingency plans.
3. The tests show that it is possible to run the process from start to finish as designed and that the results obtained are consistent.
4. the process has been documented in a clear and understandable way for those who must execute it, preferably using non-linguistic symbols (flow charts, colors, shapes, images, video) that facilitate the intuitive understanding of the instructions and compromise working memory to the minimum possible.
5. The training strictly respects what has been documented and is controlled in a systematic way, to allow an accurate recording of the neural grooves that automate the behavior and make it habitual.
It is necessary that the Biolider incorporates these tools as unjustly condemned as bureaucratic into his box and that they promote their use for those processes that require them, because the excess of documentary is as inefficient as its absolute nonexistence. We will count, then, with operations as infallible as it is humanly viable.
