2.  Understanding cognitive demands & goal conflicts; Dryden Air Ontario Crash, 1989
Channel: Adaptive Capacity Labs
Date: 2023-03-13

The 1989 Dryden Air Ontario jet crash is an example of the complex nature of the problems facing operators and how organizations create dilemmas and pass these on to operators to resolve.

This seminar introduces the notion of mapping the cognitive demands in a domain. In the wake of TMI there were many proposals to make NPPs safer by improving the control room displays. Woods and Hollnagel argued that these efforts needed to be grounded in a detailed understanding of the cognitive work of the operators. Ultimately the complexity of this and other domains overwhelmed the plan to make a complete map. Nevertheless we do make maps of cognitive demands and use these in understanding operator performance.

The seminar includes Hutchin's chapter on Micronesian islander navigation. Hutchins exposes the difficulty in discovering a practitioner's cognitive tasks when the investigator has his/her own approach to that task. Although the navigators were performing cognitive work successfully, investigators failed to understand their approach. The investigators were unable to 'see' the native cognitive task because their own mental models of that work were completely different. A major problem in research on cognitive work is that so much of it is carried out by researchers who are also practitioners in that domain.