Decision-Making Under Pressure: What the Research Actually Says
Stress doesn't just impair judgment — it changes which cues we attend to. Understanding this is the first step to designing better systems.
Resources
Everything here is built around one question: what do people need
to understand in order to perform well when it matters most?
We help our communities learn and grow by providing numerous free resources - this includes both the diving community and non-diving communities.
Click the button for the resources, articles, podcasts, videos, and free downloads, you want.
Articles and Writing
Non-Technical Skills: The Missing Layer in Dive Training
Technical proficiency is necessary but insufficient. This article examines the skills that separate experienced divers from effective ones.
The Gap Between Work-as-Imagined and Work-as-Done
Every procedure is written for a world that doesn't exist. Understanding why people deviate is more useful than punishing them for it.
Accountability Without Blame: A Practical Framework
Just Culture is often misunderstood as 'no blame.' This piece unpacks what it actually means — and why it matters for team performance.
Why 'Human Error' Is Never the Root Cause
The phrase 'human error' closes an investigation before it begins. This article explores why that label is a symptom of shallow analysis, not a conclusion.
Podcasts and Audio
Videos
Free downloads
Building Psychological Safety in Your Team
This 10-page guide defines psychological safety as the shared belief that team members can speak up, ask questions, admit mistakes, and challenge decisions without fear of humiliation or punishment. It frames psychological safety as the bedrock of high-functioning teams, not a soft add-on, but a prerequisite for operational performance and learning.
UNITED-C Guide
This 14-page guide presents the brief as the primary mechanism through which a group of individuals becomes a team. It frames the briefing not as information transmission or administrative tidying, but as the structured conversation through which a shared mental model is built before the dive or task begins.
DEBrIEF Guide
This 14-page guide presents the debrief as a simplified investigation and one of the most powerful learning tools available to high-risk teams. It frames the debrief not as a post-task formality, but as the mechanism through which individual perceptions are calibrated into a shared understanding of how work actually went, and why.
Just Culture in Practice: Guide for Small Orgs
This 30-page guide presents Just Culture as a culture of trust, learning, and accountability, distinct from no-blame. It frames the response to unwanted outcomes not as a search for culprits, but as a structured enquiry into how the action made sense to the person at the time, given the conditions of the system around them.
Why don't workers use Stop Work Authority?
This 6-page briefing synthesises three studies showing that formal stop work schemes routinely fail because stopping carries real professional and social consequences for the worker who does it. It frames the failure not as a deficit of courage at the sharp end, but as a system design problem: the conditions around the policy determine whether it functions.
Speaking Truth to Power - It's not that simple
This 4-page briefing presents research across 3,600 employees showing that willingness to speak up drops sharply down the hierarchy, and that senior leaders consistently overestimate how well they listen. It frames silence at the front line not as a personal failure of courage, but as a rational response to the conditions managers have created around them.
WITH - Understanding Error Producing Conditions
This 4-page guide presents WITH as a structured framework for identifying the conditions that make errors more likely: Work environment, Individual characteristics, Task demands, and Human nature. It frames error precursors not as character failings to be overcome through diligence, but as observable features of a situation that accumulate, compound, and can be designed out.
LFEO/LEODSI Framework and Overview
This guide introduces Learning from Emergent Outcomes (LFEO) as a way of understanding how outcomes in diving actually emerge, using frameworks including LEODSI, PETTEOT, Just Culture, and the Work-as-Imagined / Work-as-Done gap. It frames incident review not as a search for the person who erred, but as a structured analysis of the system interactions that made the actions taken entirely logical at the time.
If you want the full picture, not just the reading list — start here.
Gareth Lock
Be Better Than Yesterday
© 2026 Gareth Lock. All rights reserved.