What was the first Human Performance Tool?

Old School Cottons

Back in the 80's good Human Performance was important, but not really thought of outside of perceived "common sense," good worker practices, and an attitude to fix the current issues so the next guy would be more set up for success. Mistakes could stack up and commercial nuclear power plants would shut down, figure out what the problem or mistake was, and start right back up. This adversely affected unit capacity factors, but the economic climate supported the culture. The 80's were the end of the good ol' days and the hint of a new beginning: Human Performance Tools.  In the early 90's some pretty clever individuals (most likely INPO, but I do not know for sure - legitimate citation anyone?) came up with a new way of looking at human behavior separate from industrial safety and a "STAR" was born.  No longer would human error be tolerated in the same way; self checking was going to change the face of worker behavior and error-reduction if we could get workers to follow the simple and easy-to-remember process of Stop, Think, Act, and Review any time they're performing something critical (or important). If they did this, the plant would have better performance, and the workers would also have immediate benefit - less errors.  Signs, pamphlets and posters showed up, training was given, and it did indeed have an impact - one so important and effective that it set the stage and a necessity for other human performance tools.

In future posts the team will try to explain how the rest of the Human Performance Toolbox for plant workers really are just extrapolations of STAR.  In case we're losing you on this thought process, think of a peer check as two people performing STAR and you can probably see where we could go with this.

Homework

I would be really interested if someone could send me a picture of an old STAR sign for me to post up.  Self Checking using the STAR-process remains to this day, an important element to help us combat unwanted outcomes.

Family Photos

In the picture above is my father, a past Mechanical Maintenance First Line Supervisor.  I'm not quite sure where he was standing for this picture, and even thought it doesn't look like it, I believe he in fact IS wearing safety glasses.  When we both worked at Millstone in the 90's, he would sometime get paged as "Jim Newman...the old one... call extension xxxx."  It just occurred to be that in a few years I'll be his age in that picture.