Catch up on the latest webinar in our Critical Crisis Thinking series on As the crisis develops – Sustaining the capability to respond with Professor Erik Hollnagel.
About the session
The ETTO Principle – Efficiency-Thoroughness Trade-Off or why things that go right sometimes go wrong.
During a crisis there is limited time to think and analyse before deciding what to do. There may also be incomplete or incorrect information, inadequate resources, sudden changes in goals due to external events or internal decisions, and conflicting priorities between different stakeholders. This leads to situations where the outcome of an action means that one quality or aspect of something is lost in return for another quality or aspect being gained, i.e., where trade-offs become necessary. Trade-offs are, however, not unique to crises but actually an indispensable part of everyday activities.
The lecture will introduce and explain the so-called Efficiency-Thoroughness Trade-Off (ETTO) principle and show how it can be seen on all levels and in all kinds of activity. The irony of the ETTO principle is that people are expected to be both efficient and thorough at the same time – or rather to be thorough, when with hindsight it was wrong to be efficient.
Learning objectives
Understand that real, rather than ideal, conditions always require trade-offs to be made. These trade-offs, especially the trade-off between efficiency and thoroughness are inevitable and are generally useful rather than harmful.
About the presenter
Erik Hollnagel is Senior Professor of Patient Safety at Jönköping University (Sweden) and Visiting Professorial Fellow, Macquarie University (Australia). He is also Professor Emeritus from Linköping University (Sweden), Ecole des Mines de Paris (France), and the University of Southern Denmark. Erik has throughout his career worked at universities, research centres, and with industries in many countries and with problems from a variety of domains and industries. He has published widely and is the author/editor of 25 books, including five books on resilience engineering, as well as a large number of papers and book chapters. Erik has been President of the European Association of Cognitive Ergonomics (1994 – 2000) as well as co-founder and past President of the Resilience Engineering Association.
Watch the recording below:
