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Once again, I'm facing the possibility of hiring new safety engineers. I always find this to be a daunting task because it's never clear what criteria to use. It's relatively easy if the people are experienced safety engineers with proven track records, but often that's not the case. In fact, because of the scarcity of safety engineers, I often end up hiring people from outside the field and training them in system safety.
It seems that something other than technical knowledge might be the most important attribute — something related to a point of view, or a way of looking at or understanding the world. I've been trying to figure out what that is, but I'm finding it exceedingly difficult to pin down.
I've been attempting to figure out how I work, in the hope of being clearer about what I'm looking for. At least it might yield some insight into how others work — and that might help in my search for people who could become highly talented safety engineers.
When faced with a difficult safety problem, I might approach it "visually," by building a mental model that's both three-dimensional and dynamic. I can't actually "see" the problem (I don't have visual hallucinations of the system, for example), nor do I "see" it as in a dream, but it still feels like I'm working with a mental construct that represents the physical object. For example, if I'm worrying about the hazards associated with changing a car tire, I visualize a variety of cars, jacks, environments and people's actions. I get flooded with images and thoughts of pavement, mud, side hills, sand and wind. I see a variety of jacks, and I see people who are "handy," along with those with no mechanical experience, those who are fit or unfit, etc. This view also includes professionals in automobile shops. Then, out of this mess of thoughts, images and experiences, patterns start to form. The patterns get simpler and simpler until I'm presented with a summary of possible scenarios and solutions.
This all sounds pretty confusing, but it turns out not to be, because it all happens without my having to do much about it. It seems to happen in a part of my brain that is unconscious — I get questions and answers from that unconscious part, but I don't know much about the process used to generate them. It's a little like solving a mathematics problem. In solving math problems, I gather information to load into my mind's computer and then write out the answer. The writing of the answer isn't the solving of the problem; I'm just acting as a scribe, writing down what I already know. The process of actually solving the problem is invisible to me.
While I don't have much insight into how I solve problems, I do have some insight into what it feels like, and I have some idea of what form the answer takes. It comes as a three-dimensional model that lets me zoom in and out, and rotate the image, in my mind's eye. I can then describe that model from a wide variety of perspectives. Actually, it is more like a hologram in that it is a large number of simultaneous 3-D images. If I pick one view (for example, of using a scissor jack), then the rest temporarily recede into the background, and the selected images are those that involve scissor jacks. As I get more and more specific, it's like spinning the hologram, and I can see only those that line up with the details of interest.
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