A ๐งต on barriers to problem detection, taken from @KleInsight 's excellent paper titled "The strengths and limitations of teams for detecting problems" 1/
An anomaly may be masked (by other symptoms, other problems, background variability) 2/
An anomaly may be diffuse, in that a range of small, seemingly innocuous clues must be integrated in order to see what is going wrong 3/
The person may have his/her attention directed elsewhere, which involves the issue of workload and distraction 4/
Display saturation, screen clutter, and other difficulties of inadequate sensors or displays may hide the anomaly 5/
The expectations of the person may be erroneous (e.g., the false alarm rate may be high or the criterion may be inappropriate) 6/
The person may be reluctant to act because of fixation on an initial interpretation, discomfort with causing a disruption to a routine, the high cost of seeking more information, or other organizational constraints 7/
The complexity of dealing with multiple causes is too great 8/
High uncertainty (i.e., missing, unreliable, conflicting, or ambiguous data) may cause confusion 9/
The trajectory of differences may be too small at the early stages when the problem is still tractable. The bifurcation points may be too subtle. 10/
The signal-to-noise ratio may be too low 11/
The changes may be slow and linear, so that there is no sharp signal to initiate action 12/
Production pressure discourages vigilance for problems 13/
Team members face differential consequences of problems 14/
The high cost of sending information filters out important messages 15/
A team member may fail to notify others in the mistaken belief that they already know 16/
A team member may assume that the absence of a message means that nothing happened 17/
There may be a disconnect between the data collectors and the data interpreters 18/
Inexperienced members as data collectors may miss early signs 19/
Unskilled data collectors can mask early signs of problems 20/
Bureaucratic rivalries disrupt the exchange of data 21/
Inconsistencies may be missed if they cross team boundaries 22/
There may be difficulty in communicating the urgency of a perceptual cue 23/
Multiple patterns allow multiple interpretations, so it is easier to deflect urgency 24/
The team may fail to realize that a common understanding has been lost 25/
The team may fail to use a central node to form a common picture of events and catch patterns 26/
Expertise is lost in trying to form interpretations using indirect evidence 27/
Problem indicators may be repressed 28/
Organizational inertia hinders action 29/
Challenges to credibility can prevent action 30/30
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