Dr Simon Goncharenko
Dr Simon Goncharenko
Director, EHS
Veriforce
Save Lives: Pushing Boundaries of Human Factors
Having just published my Save Lives book this year, I pick up in it where Conklin, Dekker, Reason, Hollnagel and others left off their charge for change. My premise is that we can and must go even further than what they recommend. One of the areas that needs to be examined further is our emotions. Humans are blessed with emotions. Emotions make our lives more colorful and help us in making decisions. But emotions can also be responsible for rash judgments, unwise decisions, and violent outbursts.
Given that our organizations are made up of emotional people, emotions have a tremendous impact on the organizational culture, and the social construct we call safety. This chapter is about safety and emotions. After making the case for the role that emotions play in our homeplace and workplace, this chapter provides a short overview of the four core emotions, which are anger, sadness, fear, and joy. In considering each emotion, the chapter dives into the thought processes and behaviors that result from them or that are often associated with them and how these thought processes and behaviors can contribute to the improvement or weakening of your safety systems, protocols, and outcomes. Last but not least, this chapter also provides some practical suggestions for how to harness the right emotions and protect yourself from the potential risks and hazards of negative emotions.
Dr. Simon Goncharenko, PhD, CSP, CSHO leads Expert Services at Veriforce, LLC and is a member of the Veriforce Strategic Advisory Board. He is an academic, teaching safety on undergraduate university level, and a practitioner, with 30 years of boots-on-the-ground experience across Americas, Europe, and Asia. He has led diverse teams on multi-billion-dollar projects, specializing in operational improvements, strategic planning, and safety and in turning around struggling organizations.
Simon holds certifications in energy, construction, data centers, and more, and has worked with multi-national corporations including CBRE, BHP, Meta, and Google.
Dr. Goncharenko, whose mission is to save lives by making safety a common global currency, has authored or contributed to over 80 articles, including in the Professional Safety Journal, and 7 books, including Save Lives: Pushing Boundaries in Human Factors, and Operationalizing Twenty-First Century Safety: A Humancentric Practical Guide. The companion training to Save Lives book, entitled Save Lives Global Human & Organizational Factors(c) is the world’s first and only human factors program designed specifically for the builders, operators, and contractors of mission critical facilities and has been widely popular with countless participants around the globe. Simon is married to Alice and they reside in Texas along with their four children.