ABSTRACT
One way to address the fact that many of our accidents are due to people factors is to get the people who work for you to attend something like a fire-walking course. These may look face-valid, but should only be seen as such through the prism of being easy to set up when someone's looking for a magic bullet. Studies show that boiled-down success in life comes down to two interlinked things. The first is hard work, which has a huge impact on how much luck you might need (see the Heinrich principle), while the second, related principle is a positive mental attitude, which focuses your behaviours on the process, and not the outcome. Realizing that last year's fire-walking course, the previous year's raft-building and the inspirational speaker from the course before that didn't deliver long-term improvement in behaviour, organizations discuss calling in a human factors specialist.
