Dr. David Slater is a complex systems and safety expert based in the United Kingdom. He joined me to trace safety from the Big Bang to the control loops in the brain.
David starts with entropy. Living systems hold themselves in a state of near balance against a universe that runs down, and safety work happens inside that struggle. We connect it to John Boyd’s real OODA loop, which Boyd built on thermodynamics, neuroscience and biology.
Human error as mismatch
David uses neuroscience to take apart the idea of human error. What gets called error is often a mismatch between what a person perceives and what is happening. He brings in the free energy principle, and the difference between homeostasis, which holds a system steady, and allostasis, which adjusts it ahead of need.
Safety-II and humble teams
David describes Safety-II, which looks at how work goes right as people adapt. He argues that high-reliability teams need humility in how they orient. We also talk about why aviation simulation trains people better than most business training, about F1 pit crews, and about where AI can help model complex systems while people keep the judgment.
Orientation sits at the center of Boyd’s real OODA loop, and David’s work shows how much of safety lives there.
Where does your organization call something human error when it was a mismatch in perception?
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Written by Ponch Rivera with AI assistance in production. The full conversation is in the player below.