What governs the way in which people work together and handle technology in high risk environments? The understanding of decision making, communication and the other dimensions of team interaction within aircrews and other teams in highly stressful situations, is based on a multitude of diverse factors, each with its own literature and individual studies. This book is about how teams function in just such situations, providing a uniquely integrated and interdisciplinary account of the dynamics and main explanatory factors of team interaction under high workload. The book stems from the interdisciplinary research project 'Group Interaction in High Risk Environments' (GIHRE), a Collegium of the Gottlieb Daimler and Karl Benz Foundation. The goals of the project, and therefore the book, are to investigate, analyze and understand the behavior of professional groups working in high risk environments and to develop practical suggestions for enhancing performance. A central focus of this book is how groups in these professions deal with the factors that can threaten the safety and effectiveness of their task performance, whether these factors are part of the environment or part of the team itself. Four representative workplaces were investigated in three broad settings: in aviation, the cockpit of a commercial airliner; in medicine, the operating room and the intensive care unit of a hospital; in nuclear power, the control room of a nuclear power plant. The international and interdisciplinary composition of the Collegium ensures the book features a variety of different methodological and conceptual approaches, which are brought to bear at both theoretical and practical levels. Readers working in all related fields will find value in the case descriptions, the academic synthesis of the similarities between them, and ways to approach new challenges; specialists in applied psychology, human factors and technical management will gain new insights.

Eine Zigarre rauchen, Zeitung lesen und sich am Kopf kratzen, das kann man gleichzeitig - und zwar mühelos, konstatiert John Searle. Ein Auto im Dunkeln in eine enge Parklücke rangieren und zugleich dem Beifahrer erklären, wo die Opernkarten sind, ist heikel und mehr als heikel, wenn die Ouvertüre schon begonnen hat. Dass die Sprachverwendung, produktiv und perzeptiv, eine anspruchsvolle kognitive Aktivität ist, zeigt sich, wenn das kognitive System gleichzeitig andere anspruchsvolle Leistungen durchführt. Dann vermindert sich die Leistung, die eine oder die andere oder beide. Die Frage nach der sprachliche Performanz unter so genannten Doppelaufgabenbedingungen ist für die Sprachforschung so spannend wie ungewohnt. Antworten darauf sind nicht nur von akademischem Interesse. Im Cockpit eines Linienjets, am Operationstisch und in der Leitwarte eines Kernkraftwerks verursacht eingeschränkte Kommunikationsleistung unmittelbare Gefahr. In diesem Heft berichten u.a. Linguisten und Psycholinguisten (Krifka, Dietrich), Human-Factors-Experten (Helmreich, Sexton), Arbeitspsychologen (Grote, Sträter) über Prinzipien der Sprachverwendung unter Aufgabendruck und Zeitdruck. Abstracts: Using Language in the Cockpit: Relationships with Workload and Performance J. Bryan Sexton & Robert L. Helmreich Few events attract as much international attention as an accident involving a commercial jumbo jet airplane. The public, the airlines, the airplane manufacturers, and particularly the friends and family of passengers demand answers. The work presented here illustrates the importance of flight deck communication in flight safety through a simulator study of how and what pilots communicate. This investigation utilized a computer-based linguistic method of text analysis as well as a micro-coding of communication content. Analyses of simulator transcripts demonstrated that several language dimensions were associated with higher performance, fewer errors, and better communication. The ways in which pilots used language varied as a function of crew position and level of workload. Additionally, language use in the first flight of a crew pairing was associated with performance in subsequent flights. Group Interaction in the Cockpit: Some Linguistic Factors Manfred Krifka, Silka Martens, and Florian Schwarz For a number of years it has been recognized that the social dynamics of group interaction is an import factor in the origin of accidents and in the way how accidents or accident-prone situations are handled in aviation (cf. Helmreich 1997a, 1997b). Factors related to interpersonal communication have been implicated in up to 80% of all aviation accidents over the past 20 years. As a reaction to this, Crew Resource Management (CRM) has been developed with the goal of rating and improving crew performance in aviation and in other fields in which professional groups interact in situations of high taskload and potential risk (cf. Helmreich ea. 1999). As far as this can be estimated at all, installing CRM techniques in the major American and European airlines has resulted in a definite improvement in the safety of commercial aviation. In spite of this success of CRM, practitioners in the field feel that, beyond the general social dynamics of group interaction, there might be potential problems relating to language and communication in such settings. In this article, we first summarize some aspects of previous research in this area. Then we report findings from a project that one of us, Manfred Krifka, has carried out, using transcripts of flight simulator sessions with pilots of a commercial American airline. We will discuss some of the problems of this project. Finally, we describe an ongoing continuation of that project that uses flight simulator sessions with pilots of a commercial German airline.

All accidents and incidents at the workplace, and the resulting consequences, are tied to human beings and their actions. Although their avoidance has been a crucial part of training in aviation for the past twenty years, it has been largely ignored in many other occupations with team structures similar to those in aviation. In such professions and workplaces, those involved are under high stress, with enormous workloads, simultaneously completing mental and motor tasks, facing unexpected situations involving great risk, and with uncertain final outcomes. The goal of researchers is to find ways to minimize human error and to understand the interaction amongst the members of the team fulfilling the task. Specialized training programmes, good management and clear rules that lay out which member is responsible for making decisions can be the first steps to reducing and managing such errors. This book is a major result of the Gottlieb Daimler and Karl Benz Foundation's 6th Berlin Colloquium, ’Interaction in High Risk Environments’, hosted in 2002 by the Psycholinguistic Group of the Humbolt University Institute for German Language and Linguistics. This group is affiliated with the ongoing research group ’Group Interaction in High Risk Environments (GIHRE)’ sponsored by the Foundation based in Ladenburg, Germany. The Colloquium brings together experts from aerospace, clinical medicine, nuclear power, psychology, linguistics and psycholinguistics, to include fields that have yet to be a major focus of scientific investigations. Together, the authors explore scientific advances with direct application to a range of high risk environments. The aim is to address the issues and root causes of error and lack of teamwork by combining the knowledge of scientific experts with experience gained in different fields of industry and public life. Chapters span space travel, risk in the cockpit, safety in medicine, nuclear submarine salvage, large construction sites, police

This book provides leaders in high risk industries a better understanding of how their values and behaviors can influence the organization's safety culture and improve its capacity to bounce back from failure. Examples are illustrated through case studies and practical tools are provided to evaluate and improve an organization's culture by improving leadership capability. This unique book integrates the areas of safety culture and high reliability from the perspective of leadership in a work team environment. Readers of the book will get a fresh perspective on safety culture and reliability that can be translated into practical steps for improving their organization through its leadership.

Communications research in aviation is widely regarded by many in the healthcare community as the 'gold standard' to emulate. Yet healthcare and aviation differ in many ways, as do the vital communications shared among members of clinical teams. Aviation team communication should, then, be understood in terms of what lessons will benefit those who work in healthcare. In Improving Healthcare Team Communication, renowned experts provide insights from 'sharp end' operator research in high-hazard sectors that shed light on the performance of cognitive tasks including resource availability assessment, allocation, anticipation, prediction, trade-off decisions, speculation and negotiation. The book reports on recent field research to address what is known, and what needs to be learned, about team communication among operators. Students, clinicians and healthcare managers can find answers in it to the questions they face daily. How can healthcare information be better shared? What can we expect from its improvement, and how do we get there? Lessons learned from team communication research and experience in aviation and healthcare will point the way to improved patient safety.