Today I am going to describe a tool called Personal Intervention, a way to manage some of those personality tendencies we discussed in the last Robservation.

By now, you have hopefully downloaded the E-Colors App and have discovered your personality tendencies and how you tend to see risk. If you haven’t, you may want to pause and take a minute to do that.

For those of you that have, let’s talk about what to do about it! Once we are aware of our personality tendencies, we need to be able to manage or control them to effectively manage the risks.

Remember, the AERO task-based system is individuals being aware of and managing their personality tendencies when they are surrounded by other people, programs, processes, work environments, organization, and equipment – and how individuals with different personality tendencies see and manage these systemic drivers differently.

“Personal Intervention” is a simple method of using “Pause” and “Play” to manage your natural tendencies under the impact of a set of systemic drivers.

Personal Intervention refers to using a “pause” button to slow ourselves down, or a “play” button to do something we wouldn’t naturally do. The purpose of a “button” is to force a physical action. This physical action drives our brain to concentrate on the physical action and the thought that accompanies it (slow down or do something). We know from the most recent neuroscience that verbalization and physical actions in combination force the brain to pay attention to that specific element, thereby moving it to what Daniel Kahneman calls “System 2” or the conscious “slow brain. This increases the probability that the person will actively engage the thoughts and actions necessary to deal with the systemic drivers or risk.

The reason the tool is “Personal” intervention is that each of us tend to see and manage risk a little differently based on our personality tendencies. Some of us (like me) need to slow down and have a conscious and intentional approach to a risk (using our “pause button”) and some of us need to deal with the risk as soon as we identify it, instead of waiting on more information, using our “play” button to consciously and intentionally manage the risk before it drives an error or incident.

Personal Intervention, Pause and Play is a TOOL related to physical actions that allow us to better see and manage systemic drivers, see and manage error traps and triggers, deal with higher-risk mental models or performance modes, and move us from System 1 to System 2 thinking – thereby reducing the probability of an error or incident. In other words, Personal Intervention becomes the ‘gateway” tool that makes it more probable that this person on this task at this time will use the right tool, the right way to reduce the probability or mitigate the consequences of an error or incident.

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