Counter-Errorism in Diving: Applying Human Factors to Diving28 Jan

SH248: Top Tips for Diving Instructors: Teamwork

This episode looks at what happens when a dive “team” isn’t really functioning as a team, using a real training story where strong individual skills weren’t enough to prevent things going wrong under stress. The key lesson is that the problem wasn’t technical ability, but poor teamwork: misaligned goals, weak communication, low trust, and a lack of shared awareness. Research shows that what really makes teams perform well is not personality, confidence, or experience, but social intelligence – the ability to read others, notice stress or confusion, ask good questions, and adapt when plans change. These team skills matter just as much as buoyancy, gas planning, or drills, especially in demanding environments like technical diving. The episode explains why teamwork must be taught and practised deliberately, not assumed, and offers practical ideas for instructors and divers: train teamwork on purpose, model good team behaviour, debrief the whole team, pay attention to emotional cues, and redefine success as how well the team worked together under pressure. In short, safe and effective diving depends on strong teams, not just strong individuals.

Original blog: https://www.thehumandiver.com/blog/top-tips-for-diving-instructors-teamwork

Links: Team Players: How Social Skills Improve Team Performance study by Ben Weidmann and David Deming

More 'Top Tips for Diving Instructors' blogs

Guy’s blog about teaching teamwork: https://www.thehumandiver.com/blog/HF_Into_Archaeology

DEBrIEF model: https://www.thehumandiver.com/debrief

Tags: - english communication gareth lock instructors teamwork top tips

Denne episoden er hentet fra en åpen RSS-feed og er ikke publisert av Podme. Den kan derfor inneholde annonser.

Episoder(312)

SH312: Your Body Can't Cash the Cheque Your Ego Is Writing

We explore how capable, motivated divers can gradually push beyond safe limits when their environment rewards risk-taking and treats near misses as successes. Using the story of a young technical dive...

7 Okt 16min

SH311: 3. Don’t Wait - Learn From Everyday Work Using HOP Principles

This episode explores Human and Organizational Performance (HOP), an approach to safety that starts with the idea that people will always make mistakes, so we should focus on understanding why decisio...

3 Okt 6min

SH310: 2. More Than a Deep Dive: What a WWII Bomber Recovery Can Teach Us About Human Factors

This episode explores what really makes complex technical diving successful: not just helium, decompression and equipment, but the people using them. Using the recovery of the WWII B-24 Liberator Tuls...

30 Sep 8min

SH309: Change around Safety Culture is Really Hard

In this episode, Gareth Lock reflects on why improving diving safety requires more than telling people to follow the rules. Drawing on his experience in aviation, diving, and safety science, he explai...

23 Sep 14min

SH308: We Know, and We Say Nothing

This episode explores why experienced divers still die in situations that seem predictable, using the tragic 2026 Maldives cave accident as a starting point. It looks at how outcome bias, the normalis...

16 Sep 17min

SH307: 1. The 2026 HF in Diving Conference - What Did You Miss?

This episode explores how a restorative just culture can help the diving community respond to incidents in a way that promotes learning rather than blame. Instead of focusing only on who broke the rul...

9 Sep 15min

SH306: Restorative Just Culture: Repairing Trust After an Event

This episode explores the difference between a retributive approach to diving incidents, which focuses on blame and punishment, and a restorative just culture, which focuses on learning, repair, and p...

2 Sep 4min

SH305: Cause Reason. Excuse. Three Words Doing Three Very Different Things.

This episode explores an important distinction that is often missed when discussing diving incidents: the difference between a cause, a reason, and an excuse. A cause explains what contributed to an e...

26 Aug 9min