Risky Business: Human Error & Organizational Resiliency

$1,000

Explore core scientific principles from psychology and engineering to help you better understand what human error is, and learn ways to build barriers to prevent errors from turning into major events.
Upcoming Start Date: March 28, 2024
Location: UT Austin

This certificate program consists of three required courses (listed below) and one elective course option.

This certificate is comprised of four single-day courses.

SKU: EE24032 Category: Tag:
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Description

We live in a world that is growing in complexity. As this complexity grows and rote tasks are increasingly automated, we rely more on humans to understand the big picture and make good decisions that reduce risks, increase productivity, improve political relationships, and boost the overall bottom line. Our organizational missions simply cannot succeed without human ingenuity.

However, we also know that humans make at least three mistakes (usually 5-7) every hour that they are awake, increasing to 11-15 per hour under extreme stress or fatigue. How can we help the humans in our organizations to be more reliable now and more resilient in the future? How do we engineer our organizations, our procedures, and our cultures in a way that maximizes the benefits of having humans in our system, and mitigates the risks of those same humans making errors? How can we maintain those benefits as our world gets more complex and complicated?

This course provides you with core scientific principles from psychology and engineering to help you better understand what human error is, and ways of building barriers to keep errors from turning into major events. This seminar is helpful for people across sectors and at all organizational levels. The tools provided will empower participants to reduce error, both in their organizations and their personal lives.

Learning Objectives

What is human error? How do we understand different types of human error, and understand different types of risky behaviors? How do organizations’ typical responses to human errors increase the chances errors will happen again?

The intersection of organizational culture and human error: How does the makeup of an organization determine how likely human errors will occur? How do we incorporate the latest lessons in positive psychology to build better organizational approaches – both reducing error risk and improving productivity? How do we take shortcuts in thinking that increase our own chances of making errors, and how do we resist those tendencies?

Social dynamics, situation awareness, and human error: How do we increase the chances that we’ll continue to behave in ways that reduce error? This unit focuses on how the ways we understand our social world and process information affect the propensity for human errors.

Fatigue, diet, exercise, and human error: This unit covers all the ways “you are what you eat” – the relationship between our food and our bodies, and how human errors are affected by fatigue, social contact with others, and attempts to multitask.

High-Reliability Organization (HRO) practices in reducing human error: This unit covers the ways that organizations and individuals can follow proven techniques for drastically reducing both the chances and the severity of human errors. These tools have been quite successful in aviation, space travel, healthcare, nuclear power, electricity, fire fighting, and a variety of other sectors.

Certificate Requirements

Information

Details & Registration

Time: 9 a.m.-4 p.m.
Continuing Education Units (CEUs): 0.6 CEUs will be awarded upon completion of this program (six hours of instruction)

One-Day Seminar Pricing:

Registration fee includes all course materials, catering (lunch and refreshments), WiFi access, and parking.

  • Standard Registration: $1,000
  • UT System Staff/Alumni Registration: $750
  • Educator, Nonprofit, Government, Military Registration: $750

Get employer support! We’ve gathered resources to help you make the case for your employer to support your HDO education.

If you have questions prior to registering, please see our Professional Training FAQ or contact Andrew M. Vasquez, HDO’s Enrollment & Success Coordinator at hdo-pro@austin.utexas.edu.

Course Leader(s)

Mike Legatt

Mike Legatt, Ph.D.

Mike Legatt is the CEO and founder of ResilientGrid, Inc., whose mission is to grow resilient infrastructures by optimizing the human side of the infrastructure management, including situational awareness, decision making support and collaboration tools in normal and emergency operations, and in fostering the kinds of organizational culture (high reliability, just culture) that empower humans to work more efficiently and effectively, lowering human error rates. Dr. Legatt has been a programmer for over 25 years, and worked in the energy, financial, medical, neuroscience research and educational sectors. He has M.A. and Ph.D. degrees in clinical health psychology/neuropsychology from the Ferkauf Graduate School of Psychology/Albert Einstein College of Medicine, and M.S.E. and Ph.D. degrees in energy systems engineering from the University of Texas at Austin, and is a Certified Performance Technologist.

Prior to founding ResilientGrid, Michael spent ten years as the principal human factors engineer for the Electric Reliability Council of Texas (ERCOT), which manages the flow of electricity to over 24 million Texas customers, about 90% of Texas’ load. There, his development of the Macomber Map® has been featured in the New York Times, National Public Radio, T&D World, and Forbes. The Macomber Map was credited as being instrumental in helping ERCOT operators maintain grid reliability during several record-setting wind generation levels since 2010, and through several severe weather events since 2009.

As an amateur (ham) radio operator, he received a commendation for helping to provide emergency communications during the 2003 blackout in the northeastern United States, which sparked his interest in the psychology of energy management. He works to support the growth of the industry’s high-reliability organizational culture, and to reduce human error by helping to optimize human-computer interactions, supporting improved situation awareness, decision support, processing speed, and stress management. At ERCOT, his development of the Macomber Map® has been featured in The New York Times, National Public Radio, Forbes, and T&D World. The Macomber Map was credited as being instrumental in helping ERCOT operators maintain grid reliability during several record-setting wind generation levels since 2010, and through several severe weather events since 2009.


Who Should Participate

 

  • Senior/Executive Leadership
  • Managers and Directors
  • Team Leaders & Supervisors
  • New or First-Time Managers
  • Team Leaders & Supervisors
  • Human Resources/Recruiting Directors & Managers
  • Quality Assurance and Risk Management Professionals
Testimonial

Far and away the most engaging and informative session so far. I came away with a clear sense of what my company does well and what we will have to work on. Dr. Legatt is awesome! He brought a detailed wealth of information on both theory and practice. The students are setting up a discussion group to keep talking with him – it sounds like everyone felt the same!

Michael New

Director of Performance Improvement, San Marcos Treatment Center

From Certificate Seeker to Competitive Advantage in Just Four Days

Built on strong academic fundamentals and real-world relevance, HDO Certificate Programs are designed to enhance the portfolios of mid- and upper-level professionals.

Over the course of your program, you will gain immediately-applicable tools and skills to accelerate your career, whether your goal is advancing in your current organization, deepening your capacities to excel in your existing role, or developing additional skills for a transition to a new position. In the process, you will learn alongside and network with experienced professionals from a wide range of industries.

Courses Led by Top Faculty

“My favorite part of the Certificate Program was, hands down, the cross-disciplinary faculty. What remarkable minds! I gained multiple new lenses through which to view workplace challenges. I felt so lucky to have exposure and access to these extraordinary educators. The HDO faculty is world class. I can’t stop raving.”

Sarah Gerichten, Director of Marketing, Square Root, Inc.

Transform Your Organization with Group Training

By applying cutting-edge research and expertise from UT Austin’s top faculty to your organization’s unique challenges, our training programs are designed to:

  1. Build a dynamic organizational culture that fosters innovative thinking and embraces change.
  2. Strengthen team cohesion around existing or aspirational goals.
  3. Enhance leadership skills at all levels, from first-time managers to senior leaders and executives.