Diagnostic Expertise in Organizational Environments

Mark W. Wiggins · Thomas Loveday

Mar 2017 · CRC Press

About this ebook

Diagnostic Expertise in Organizational Environments provides a state-of-the-art foundation for a new paradigm in expertise research and practice. Skilled diagnosis is essential for accurate and efficient performance across a range of organizational contexts, including aviation, finance, rail, forensic investigation, firefighting, and medicine. However, it is also a complex process, subject to the abilities and experience of individual operators, the culture and practices of organizations, the relationships between operators, and the availability and usefulness of technology. As a consequence, diagnostic skills can be difficult to learn, maintain, and evaluate. This volume is a comprehensive approach that examines diagnostic expertise at the level of the individual practitioner, in the social context, and at the organizational level. The chapter authors comprise both academics and highly skilled practitioners so that there is a clear transition from understanding the problem of diagnostic skills to the implementation of solutions, either through redesign, training, and/or selection. It will appeal to those academics and practitioners interested and involved in this field and also prove useful to students of psychology, cognitive science education and/or computer interaction.

About the author

Mark Wiggins is Professor of Organisational Psychology and Deputy Director of the Centre for Elite Performance, Expertise and Training at Macquarie University, Sydney, Australia. He graduated with a PhD in Psychology in 2001 from the University of Otago and his research interests lie in understanding, assessing, and improving operators’ capacity to interpret and respond to changes in complex systems. He has published in both academic and industry journals, and has acted as an advisor to the United States Federal Aviation Administration, the Australian Civil Aviation Safety Authority, the Australian Transport Safety Bureau, TransGrid, Powerlink, and Parsons Brinckerhoff. Thomas Loveday is a Registered Psychologist in New South Wales and a member of the Human Factors and Ergonomic Society. He is currently employed as a post-doctoral researcher within the Centre for Elite Performance, Expertise and Training (CEPET) at Macquarie University and as a Human Factors Specialist at the Clinical Excellence Commission, NSW Health. Thomas has a number of publications investigating the relationship between expertise, decision-making, and interface cues in high-risk, high reliability industries like power distribution, anaesthesia, and aviation. He was recently one of the recipients of a research grant from the Australian and New Zealand College of Anaesthetists. He has also consulted on interface design evaluations for the banking industry, next-generation air-traffic control systems, and rail-control interfaces.