Developing Human Performance for High-Risk Operations

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 In high-risk operations, performance is not defined by effort, experience, or compliance. It is defined by how reliably people perceive, think, decide, and act under pressure.

Developing Human Performance for High-Risk Operations is a foundational program designed for all personnel working in safety-critical roles, from early-career professionals to experienced operators and supervisors.

Rather than focusing on rules, procedures, and checklists alone, this course explains how human performance is shaped by attention, workload, fatigue, stress, situational awareness, and decision-making quality. Participants learn why well-trained and highly experienced professionals remain vulnerable to predictable errors, how performance degrades in routine and abnormal operations, and how small behavioral drift accumulates into major operational risk.

Through real operational examples and practical tools, participants develop the ability to recognize performance-limiting conditions, manage cognitive load, maintain situational awareness, apply procedural discipline effectively, and intervene early when performance begins to degrade.

The program establishes a common foundation in human performance across the workforce, creating a shared language, shared mental models, and shared reliability discipline essential for sustaining safe operations in complex, high-risk environments.

By developing human performance upstream of failure, organizations strengthen frontline reliability, reduce execution errors, improve procedural quality, and build a workforce capable of sustaining safe operations under real operational conditions.

Who Should Attend

This program is designed for all personnel in safety-critical operational roles, including:

• New hires and graduate engineers
• Operators, technicians, and maintenance personnel
• Experienced field and control room staff
• Supervisors, team leads, and shift leaders

Learning Outcomes

Participants will be able to:

• Understand how human performance degrades in high-risk operations
• Recognize the effects of fatigue, stress, workload, and distraction
• Apply situational awareness principles in daily work
• Maintain attention and manage cognitive load during tasks
• Execute procedures with discipline and self-verification
• Identify early warning signs of performance drift
• Communicate, cross-check, and challenge effectively within teams

Core Topics Covered

• Human performance in complex systems
• Attention, workload, and vigilance decay
• Situational awareness fundamentals
• Error formation and performance traps
• Procedural discipline and execution quality
• Fatigue, stress, and decision degradation
• Speaking up and team performance
• Drift, normalization, and early warning signs

This program establishes a common human performance baseline across the organization, reducing variability in execution quality, strengthening early anomaly detection, improving cross-team communication, and accelerating the development of a reliable operational culture.