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Is a Just Culture needed to support learning from near misses and diving accidents?
Human factors coach Gareth Lock delves deep into the meaning, impact, and need for “Just Culture” in diving, as well as creating a psychologically-safe environment that enables divers to highlight and challenge possible safety issues. Lock argues that both are essential, and offers practical suggestions for building the culture we deserve.
Text and photos courtesy of Gareth Lock

The heavily regulated aviation industry is often praised for its effective Just Culture, which has facilitated an ultra-safe operating environment. What purpose could a Just Culture serve in diving, and why should we care when we are in an unregulated environment? Aviation is ultra-safe—regulatory agencies implement safety targets and demand continuous improvement of safety performance. Nevertheless, adverse events still happen. Why? Because of the complex nature of operations and the variability of human performance. It isn’t because of ‘stupid pilots’ and/or ‘pilot error.’
The following two stories centre around a similar adverse event—a departure from a point on the runway the crew weren’t expecting—but have very different outcomes when it comes to the opportunities to learn and improve. As you read them, consider which one has more parallels with diving and the diving community.
Case #1
A crew of four pilots taxi out at night to depart from Miami, Florida to Doha, Qatar on a Boeing 777 with 279 people onboard. Due to busy radio communications and an internal misunderstanding as they navigated around the airfield at night, the crew mistakenly entered a runway at a point that was further from the departure end than their performance planning assumed. This meant that the runway distance available to them was 2,610 m/8,563 ft instead of 3,610 m/11,844 ft. The crew had not noticed this problem before they asked for departure clearance.
After they received departure clearance, they accelerated down the runway to reach take-off speed. Very shortly after the crew ‘rotated’ (pulled back on the stick), the aircraft struck the approach lights of the opposite runway, causing damage including puncturing the skin of the aircraft. Fortunately, the puncture did not breach the pressure hull. The crew were unaware of the impact and carried on their flight to Doha without any further issues. On arrival, while taxiing in, the ground crew noticed the damage and informed the flight crew.
This event was widely reported in the media. It was also investigated internally and by local aviation authorities. The CEO’s response was, “We will not accept any kind of lapses by pilots because they have hundreds of passengers whom they risked,” and all four pilots were fired. Scarily, and I believe falsely, he also stated that “At no time was the aircraft or the passengers put in any harm’s way.” However, the aircraft was still on the ground when it left the runway, and if the crew had to abort their take-off just before rotate speed, the aircraft would have likely gone off the end of the runway and into the waterway—and probably the housing estate outside the airfield perimeter—with the loss of the aircraft and possibly passengers and crew.
Case #2
The flight crew were operating from a Caribbean island with a single runway after they had arrived the night before as passengers. Neither the Captain nor the First Officer had been there before. They boarded their aircraft in the dark just before their passengers arrived. Once everyone was onboard, they left the parking area via the single entrance to the runway, and they turned to go to their departure end. The airport diagram they were using for navigation showed a single large concrete turning circle at the end of the runway. As they taxied down to where they thought the end was, they came across a large concrete circle and so started their turnaround process to line up facing the other way to depart.
They gained departure clearance and started to accelerate down the runway to reach their rotational speed. After rotating, they noticed that the lights at the other end of the runway passed under them more quickly than they expected for a runway of this length.
Once they arrived back in the UK, independently, both the Captain and First Officer looked online at Google Earth as they had an uneasy feeling about what had happened. What they found was that there were two concrete circles on the runway and not just the one as marked on their taxi diagram.
They immediately got a hold of their dispatch team and let them know that the airport diagram they had operated with wasn’t accurate and could cause a major problem. They also raised an Air Safety Report (ASR) within their airline so others could learn from the circumstances. The crew were congratulated for reporting this event, even though their departure safety margins had been reduced. The charts were amended as a consequence.
Given that pilots are reported to make between three to six errors per hour, which airline would you rather operate with—the one that welcomes and congratulates its operators for reporting mistakes, or the one that punishes them? Furthermore, how important do you think the perception (or illusion) of safety is for the first airline’s customer base? The absence of reported near misses, incidents or accidents does not mean that your system is safe. Paradoxically, those organisations who report more and learn from those reports have fewer adverse events, especially repeat events.
What is a Just Culture?
A Just Culture was originally mentioned in 1997 as part of James Reason’s work in Managing the Risk of Organisational Accidents where he describes it as being part of a Safety Culture. There were five sub-cultures that made up a safety culture: just culture, reporting culture, informed culture, flexible culture, and a learning culture. The image below shows their interaction in more detail. My personal view is that Just Culture supports everything else, but it could be argued that if you don’t have a Reporting Culture, you don’t need a Just Culture.


Reason recognised that a wholly Just Culture is unattainable, but that there needs to be some line between errors or unwanted outcomes caused by system design and human performance variability, and those caused by gross negligence, sabotage, or reckless behaviour. As he highlights, “The difficulty is discriminating between these few truly ‘bad apples’ and the vast majority of unsafe acts to which the attribution of blame is neither appropriate nor useful.” Sidney Dekker, author of Just Culture goes further and says, “It isn’t so much where the line is drawn, but who draws it.” In the world of diving, it is often online peers or the lawyers who draw the line. The former rarely have the full context and don’t understand human error and human factors, and the latter aren’t necessarily interested in wider organisational learning, as they are focused on their claim.
What does a Just Culture do?

A Just Culture facilitates the sharing of conditions or outcomes which aren’t expected or wanted—e.g., near misses, incidents, and accidents. The sharing happens because there is a recognition and acceptance within the team, organisation, or sector that human errors are part of normal operations and that professionals come to work to do a good job in spite of the limitations and constraints which are part of their job. These limitations and constraints create tensions and conflicts between doing what is written in manuals and procedures (Work as Imagined) and what really happens (Work as Done) to achieve the results for which they are being rewarded (e.g., productivity goals). Sometimes it isn’t possible to complete the job by following the rules because of these conflicts—conflicts which often have commercial drivers as their source. For example, pilots might not be able to do all their pre-departure checks in the correct order and at the right time because of limited ground time on turnarounds. For the aircrew, this can be business as usual, but in the event of an accident investigation, this would be picked up as deviant behaviour.
This is like dive centres who are commercially driven and face local competition. They would like to up their productivity (to make up for reduced costs), but this means that standards might be bent every now and again to make things work. This could mean diving deeper than maximum depths to make use of boats for multiple clients and/or courses, not completing the minimum dive time or the minimum number of dives which increases instructor availability, increasing the number of students in a class to maximise revenue or deal with a shortage of instructors/DMs, or not having surface cover when needed because they couldn’t be sourced or they cost too much to include in the course fees. There is also the very real issue that some standards are not valid or that organisations accept unauthorised protocol changes but don’t do anything about that.
Proceduralising a Culture? Isn’t that an Oxymoron?
Understanding this context is not easy, so part of Reason’s initial work was the production of a flow-diagram or process which showed managers how they could look at an event and determine where culpability might lie and how it should be dealt with. This framework has been reproduced by multiple different organisations like Shell, the Keil Centre, and Baines Simmons.

Each of these processes is a decision tree, with the outcome determining what sort of action should be taken against the individual—sometimes it is punitive. On the surface, this sounds like a good idea. The problem is that these processes rarely consider the rich context that is needed to understand how it made sense for someone to do what they did, with biases like hindsight, outcome bias, severity bias, and the fundamental attribution bias getting in the way of understanding what really happened. This often leads to punishment when it is not applicable. Furthermore, which of the many individual contributory or causal factors do you examine as part of this ‘process?’ Most of the time, the focus is on the ‘sharp end’—those doing the work, rather than further up the organisational chain and the conditions.
Some organisations have inserted two additional tests to help managers determine if this was an individual problem or a systemic one. The substitution test asks if someone with the same knowledge, skills, and experience, and under the same pressures and drivers, but without knowledge of the outcome, would do the same thing. If they would, then it is likely a system issue. The other test concerns whether this event/action has happened before to either the organisation or to the individual. In both cases, if it has, then it highlights organisational weakness either in system design or training/coaching of the individual after the first (or subsequent) event.
The problem with such process-based approaches is that they can’t create a culture, therefore they can’t be part of a Just Culture. Fundamentally, a culture can’t be proceduralised—a culture is based on the relationships and interactions between individuals of a group, team, organisation, sector, or nation. Ultimately, it is ‘how things are done around here,’ often without those involved knowing why! We love technology to make things easier, but in this case, a process flow chart doesn’t help create a Just Culture.
Build the organisational learning into the investigation process
Things have changed in some organisations though. BP decided to review and rewrite their Just Culture process because they realised it wasn’t working as intended—the goal of the policy was to facilitate learning from near-misses, incidents, and accidents, but they were missing too much. Their rework meant that they asked learning-focused questions as part of their investigation process. Rather than asking the Just Culture questions at the end, in isolation and with limited information, they required the investigators to ask the questions during the investigation to generate the rich context needed to understand the event. Consequently, they found that 90% of their incidents were systemic in nature and were not caused by human error of those operating at the sharp end. You can see an extract from their investigation flow-diagram below. While this is a process, the purpose is to facilitate discussion and learning during the investigation rather than using an isolated judgement at the end.

Does diving need a Just Culture?
The simple answer is yes. It also needs a psychologically-safe environment. In my opinion, psychological safety is needed before an event to allow latent conditions to be highlighted and challenged, whereas a Just Culture is needed after an event to allow discussions to take place around the context and how it occurred. Psychological safety supports the discussions under a Just Culture.
The diving community needs a culture that follows those same initial concepts from James Reason in 1997, the recognition that errors are normal, that the skills and experience of those involved within the current operating environment must be considered, and that only when gross negligence or sabotage are present should we look at punitive action. This means that when adverse events occur in diving and they are not subject to legal action, then the events should be used for learning. Unfortunately, the legal systems do not currently address the needs of a Just Culture because the goal is to find someone or some organisation to blame and which will facilitate damage claims. In my opinion, this poses a problem in the US where litigation is rife, particularly in diving, often for minor events. Unfortunately, in some cases, litigation is the only way to get some form of damages, or even an apology.
Diving learning from Healthcare and Wildland Firefighting?
Fortunately, it doesn’t have to be that way. Following a discussion with a colleague at Lund University, Sweden where I am currently studying for a MSc in Human Factors and System Safety, I was told that there are hundreds of hospitals in the USA who have made inroads into reducing litigation claims and increasing patient safety by undertaking Communication and Resolution Programmes (CRPs). These CRPs have reduced litigation, increased individual and organisational learning, increased patient safety, and, ultimately, have reduced insurance premiums because problems are resolved in a different manner. These programmes are based around a common understanding of human error, performance-shaping factors, and a Just Culture. Fundamentally, if you don’t understand human error, then you can’t create a Just Culture. Regarding Wildland Firefighting, I have previously written on that in InDepth.

In the sports diving sector, we don’t have a standardised, structured investigation process which is based around learning with most investigations looking at proximal causes rather than systemic ones, and often looking for blame. Even in the commercial sector, the HSE and OSHA are focused on non-compliance rather than learning opportunities. This means that building the ‘Just Culture’ questions into the learning process isn’t possible (at the moment). However, as a culture is based on the relationships and interactions between those within a team, organisation, or sector and the language they use, we can certainly start to develop one by changing the language we use to facilitate the sharing of, and learning from, near misses and incidents/accidents. Producing documentaries like ‘If Only…’ is a great way to get the concepts across by telling a story, and stories are how we learn.
I know of one GUE community who have set up their own ‘Learning Forum’ on Facebook which allows the open, critiquing (but not critical) discussion of adverse events and near misses—a forum I support. The Human Diver: Human Factors in Diving Facebook group also supports a learning-based approach with very mature conversations taking place when adverse events are discussed.

How can you help build this culture?
Start by being curious and limiting your judgments. While it is hard, try not to fall foul of the cognitive biases that I mentioned earlier, ask the simple question, “How did it make sense for them to do what they did?”, and you might be surprised at the answers you get back. Asking “How?” moves the focus to the context; “Why?” and ‘“Who?” are all about the person which invokes a blame response. At the organisational level, asking the same questions can highlight gaps in your own processes, procedures, expectations, and leadership. If instructors are consistently breaching standards, is it because the standard is unachievable or does not add the value you think it does to the operation? Firing them without understanding why they breached the standard is an example of a failed Just Culture. It can be uncomfortable to ask this question, but asking it is essential for improvement. Plus, in this scenario, you don’t need an accident to create learning because the latent conditions are already present. All you need is a genuine curiosity and a desire to learn and improve.
Dive Deeper:
Human Diver: They broke the rules! So…?
InDEPTH: Human Factors page

Gareth Lock has been involved in high-risk work since 1989. He spent 25 years in the Royal Air Force in a variety of front-line operational, research and development, and systems engineering roles which have given him a unique perspective. In 2005, he started his dive training with GUE and is now an advanced trimix diver (Tech 2) and JJ-CCR Normoxic trimix diver. In 2016, he formed The Human Diver with the goal of bringing his operational, human factors, and systems thinking to diving safety. Since then, he has trained more than 450 people face-to-face around the globe, taught nearly 2,000 people via online programmes, sold more than 4,000 copies of his book Under Pressure: Diving Deeper with Human Factors, and produced “If Only…,” a documentary about a fatal dive told through the lens of Human Factors and A Just Culture.
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Twenty-five Years in the Pursuit of Excellence – The Evolution and Future of GUE
Founder and president Jarrod Jablonski describes his more than a quarter of a century long quest to promote excellence in technical diving.

by Jarrod Jablonski. Images courtesy of J. Jablonski and GUE unless noted.
The most difficult challenges we confront in our lives are the most formative and are instrumental in shaping the person we become. When I founded Global Underwater Explorers (GUE), the younger version of myself could not have foreseen all the challenges I would face, but equally true is that he would not have known the joy, the cherished relationships, the sense of purpose, the rich adventures, the humbling expressions of appreciation from those impacted, or the satisfaction of seeing the organization evolve and reshape our industry. Many kindred souls and extraordinary events have shaped these last 25 years, and an annotated chronology of GUE is included in this issue of InDEPTH. This timeline, however, will fail to capture the heart behind the creation of GUE, it will miss the passionate determination currently directing GUE, or the committed dedication ready to guide the next 25 years.

I don’t remember a time that I was not in, around, and under the water. Having learned to swim before I could walk, my mother helped infuse a deep connection to the aquatic world. I was scuba certified in South Florida with my father, and promptly took all our gear to North Florida where I became a dive instructor at the University of Florida. It was then that I began my infatuation with cave diving. I was in the perfect place for it, and my insatiable curiosity was multiplied while exploring new environments. I found myself with a strong desire to visit unique and hard-to-reach places, be they far inside a cave or deep within the ocean.
My enthusiasm for learning was pressed into service as an educator, and I became enamored with sharing these special environments. Along with this desire to share the beauty and uniqueness of underwater caves was a focused wish to assist people in acquiring the skills I could see they needed to support their personal diving goals. It could be said that these early experiences were the seeds that would germinate, grow, mature, and bloom into the organizing principles for GUE.



The Pre-GUE Years
Before jumping into the formational days of GUE, allow me to help you visualize the environment that was the incubator for the idea that became GUE’s reality. By the mid-1990s, I was deeply involved in a variety of exploration activities and had been striving to refine my own teaching capacity alongside this growing obsession for exploratory diving. While teaching my open water students, I was in the habit of practicing to refine my own trim and buoyancy, noticing that the students quickly progressed and were mostly able to copy my position in the water. Rather than jump immediately into the skills that were prescribed, I started to take more time to refine their comfort and general competency. This subtle shift made a world of difference in the training outcomes, creating impressive divers with only slightly more time and a shift in focus. In fact, the local dive boats would often stare in disbelief when told these divers were freshly certified, saying they looked better than most open water instructors!
By this point in my career, I could see the problems I was confronting were more systemic and less individualistic. In retrospect, it seemed obvious that key principles had been missing in both my recreational and technical education, not to mention the instructor training I received. The lack of basic skill refinement seemed to occur at all levels of training, from the beginner to the advanced diver. Core skills like buoyancy or in-water control were mainly left for divers to figure out on their own and almost nobody had a meaningful emphasis on efficient movement in the water. It was nearly unheard of to fail people in scuba diving, and even delaying certification for people with weak skills was very unusual. This remains all too common to this day, but I believe GUE has shifted the focus in important ways, encouraging people to think of certification more as a process and less as a right granted to them because they paid for training.

The weakness in skill refinement during dive training was further amplified by little-to-no training in how to handle problems when they developed while diving, as they always do. In those days, even technical/cave training had very little in the way of realistic training in problem resolution. The rare practice of failures was deeply disconnected from reality. For example, there was almost no realistic scenario training for things like a failed regulator or light. What little practice there was wasn’t integrated into the actual dive and seemed largely useless in preparing for real problems. I began testing some of my students with mock equipment failures, and I was shocked at how poorly even the best students performed. They were able to quickly develop the needed skills, but seeing how badly most handled their first attempts left me troubled about the response of most certified divers should they experience problems while diving, as they inevitably would.
Diving Fatalities
Meanwhile, I was surrounded by a continual progression of diving fatalities, and most appeared entirely preventable. The loss of dear friends and close associates had a deep impact on my view of dive training and especially on the procedures being emphasized at that time within the community. The industry, in those early days, was wholly focused on deep air and solo diving. However, alarmingly lacking were clear bottle marking or gas switching protocols. It seemed to me to be no coincidence that diver after diver lost their lives simply because they breathed the wrong bottle at depth. Many others died mysteriously during solo dives or while deep diving with air.
One of the more impactful fatalities was Bob McGuire, who was a drill sergeant, friend, and occasional dive buddy. He was normally very careful and focused. One day a small problem with one regulator caused him to switch regulators before getting in the water. He was using a system that used color-coded regulators to identify the gas breathed. When switching the broken regulator, he either did not remember or did not have an appropriately colored regulator. This small mistake cost him his life. I clearly remember turning that one around in my head quite a bit. Something that trivial should not result in the loss of a life.
Also disturbing was the double fatality of good friends, Chris and Chrissy Rouse, who lost their lives while diving a German U-boat in 70 m/230 ft of water off the coast of New Jersey. I remember, as if the conversation with Chris were yesterday, asking him not to use air and even offering to support the cost as a counter to his argument about the cost of helium. And the tragedies continued: The loss of one of my closest friends Sherwood Schille, the death of my friend Steve Berman who lived next to me and with whom I had dived hundreds of times, the shock of losing pioneering explorer Sheck Exley, the regular stream of tech divers, and the half dozen body recoveries I made over only a couple years, which not only saddened me greatly, but also made me angry. Clearly, a radically different approach was needed.
Learning to Explore
Meanwhile, my own exploration activities were expanding rapidly. Our teams were seeking every opportunity to grow their capability while reducing unnecessary risk. To that end, we ceased deep air diving and instituted a series of common protocols with standardized equipment configurations, both of which showed great promise in expanding safety, efficiency, and comfort. We got a lot of things wrong and experienced enough near misses to keep us sharp and in search of continual improvement.

But we looked carefully at every aspect of our diving, seeking ways to advance safety, efficiency, and all-around competency while focusing plenty of attention into the uncommon practice of large-scale, team diving, utilizing setup dives, safety divers, and inwater support. We developed diver propulsion vehicle (DPV) towing techniques, which is something that had not been done previously. We mostly ignored and then rewrote CNS oxygen toxicity calculations, developed novel strategies for calculating decompression time, and created and refined standard procedures for everything from bottle switching to equipment configurations. Many of these developments arose from simple necessity. There were no available decompression programs and no decompression tables available for the dives we were doing. Commonly used calculations designed to reduce the risk of oxygen toxicity were useless to our teams, because even our more casual dives were 10, 20, or even 30 times the allowable limit. The industry today takes most of this for granted, but in the early days of technical diving, we had very few tools, save a deep motivation to go where no one had gone before.

Many of these adventures included friends in the Woodville Karst Plain Project (WKPP), where I refined policies within the team and most directly with longtime dive buddy George Irvine. This “Doing it Right” (DIR) approach sought to create a more expansive system than Hogarthian diving, which itself had been born in the early years of the WKPP and was named after William Hogarth Main, a friend and frequent dive buddy of the time. By this point, I had been writing about and expanding upon Hogarthian diving for many years. More and more of the ideas we wanted to develop were not Bill Main’s priorities and lumping them into his namesake became impractical, especially given all the debate within the community over what was and was not Hogarthian.
A similar move from DIR occurred some years later when GUE stepped away from the circular debates that sought to explain DIR and embraced a GUE configuration with standard protocols, something entirely within our scope to define.
These accumulating events reached critical mass in 1998. I had experienced strong resistance to any form of standardization, even having been asked to join a special meeting of the board of directors (BOD) for a prominent cave diving agency. Their intention was to discourage me from using any form of standard configuration, claiming that students should be allowed to do whatever they “felt’ was best. It was disconcerting for me, as a young instructor, to be challenged by pioneers in the sport; nevertheless, I couldn’t agree with the edict that someone who was doing something for the first time should be tasked with determining how it should be done.
This sort of discussion was common, but the final straw occurred when I was approached by the head of a technical diving agency, an organization for which I had taught for many years. I was informed that he considered it a violation of standards not to teach air to a depth of at least 57 m/190 ft. This same individual told me that I had to stop using MOD bottle markings and fall in line with the other practices endorsed by his agency. Push had finally come to shove, and I set out to legitimize the training methods and dive protocols that had been incubating in my mind and refined with our teams over the previous decade. Years of trial and many errors while operating in dynamic and challenging environments were helping us to identify what practices were most successful in support of excellence, safety, and enjoyment.
Forming GUE
Forming GUE as a non-profit company was intended to neutralize the profit motivations that appeared to plague other agencies. We hoped to remove the incentive to train—and certify—the greatest number of divers as quickly as possible because it seemed at odds with ensuring comfortable and capable divers. The absence of a profit motive complemented the aspirational plans that longtime friend Todd Kincaid and I had dreamed of. We imagined a global organization that would facilitate the efforts of underwater explorers while supporting scientific research and conservation initiatives.
I hoped to create an agency that placed most of the revenue in the hands of fully engaged and enthusiastic instructors, allowing them the chance to earn a good living and become professionals who might stay within the industry over many years. Of course, that required forgoing the personal benefit of ownership and reduced the revenue available to the agency, braking its growth and complicating expansion plans. This not only slowed growth but provided huge challenges in developing a proper support network while creating the agency I envisioned. There were years of stressful days and nights because of the need to forgo compensation and the deep dependance upon generous volunteers who had to fit GUE into their busy lives. If it were not for these individuals and our loyal members, we would likely never have been successful. Volunteer support and GUE membership have been and remain critical to the growing success of our agency. If you are now or have ever been a volunteer or GUE member, your contribution is a significant part of our success, and we thank you.

The challenges of the early years gave way to steady progress—always slower than desired, with ups and downs, but progress, nonetheless. Some challenges were not obvious at the outset. For example, many regions around the world were very poorly developed in technical diving. Agencies intent on growth seemed to ignore that problem, choosing whoever was available, and regardless of their experience in the discipline, they would soon be teaching.
This decision to promote people with limited experience became especially problematic when it came to Instructor Trainers. People with almost no experience in something like trimix diving were qualifying trimix instructors. Watching this play out in agency after agency, and on continent after continent, was a troubling affair. Conversely, it took many years for GUE to develop and train people of appropriate experience, especially when looking to critical roles, including high-level tech and instructor trainers. At the same time, GUE’s efforts shaped the industry in no small fashion as agencies began to model their programs after GUE’s training protocols. Initially, having insisted that nobody would take something like Fundamentals, every agency followed suit in developing their own version of these programs, usually taught by divers that had followed GUE training.
This evolving trend wasn’t without complexity but was largely a positive outcome. Agencies soon focused on fundamental skills, incorporated some form of problem-resolution training, adhered to GUE bottle and gas switching protocols, reduced insistence on deep air, and started talking more about developing skilled divers, among other changes. This evolution was significant when compared to the days of arguing about why a person could not learn to use trimix until they were good while diving deep on air.
To be sure, a good share of these changes was more about maintaining business relevance than making substantive improvements. The changes themselves were often more style than substance, lacking objective performance standards and the appropriate retraining of instructors. Despite these weaknesses, they remain positive developments. Talking about something is an important first step and, in all cases, it makes room for strong instructors in any given agency to practice what is being preached. In fact, these evolving trends have allowed GUE to now push further in the effort to create skilled and experienced divers, enhancing our ability to run progressively more elaborate projects with increasingly more sophisticated outcomes.
The Future of GUE
The coming decades of GUE’s future appear very bright. Slow but steady growth has now placed the organization in a position to make wise investments, ensuring a vibrant and integrated approach. Meanwhile, evolving technology and a broad global base place GUE in a unique and formidable position. Key structural and personnel adjustments complement a growing range of virtual tools, enabling our diverse communities and representatives to collaborate and advance projects in a way that, prior to now, was not possible. Strong local communities can be easily connected with coordinated global missions; these activities include ever-more- sophisticated underwater initiatives as well as structural changes within the GUE ecosystem. One such forward-thinking project leverages AI-enabled, adaptive learning platforms to enhance both the quality and efficiency of GUE education. Most agencies, including GUE, have been using some form of online training for years, but GUE is taking big steps to reinvent the quality and efficiency of this form of training. This is not to replace, but rather to extend and augment inwater and in-person learning outcomes. Related tools further improve the fluidity, allowing GUE to seamlessly connect previously distant communities, enabling technology, training, and passion to notably expand our ability to realize our broad, global mission.

Meanwhile, GUE and its range of global communities are utilizing evolving technologies to significantly expand the quality and scope of their project initiatives. Comparing the impressive capability of current GUE communities with those of our early years shows a radical and important shift, allowing results equal or even well beyond those possible when compared even with well-funded commercial projects. Coupled with GUE training and procedural support, these ongoing augmentations place our communities at the forefront of underwater research and conservation. This situation will only expand and be further enriched with the use of evolving technology and closely linked communities. Recent and planned expansions to our training programs present a host of important tools that will continue being refined in the years to come. Efforts to expand and improve upon the support provided to GUE projects with technology, people, and resources are now coming online and will undoubtedly be an important part of our evolving future.
The coming decades will undoubtedly present challenges. But I have no doubt that together we will not only overcome those obstacles but we will continue to thrive. I believe that GUE’s trajectory remains overwhelmingly positive, for we are an organization that is continually evolving—driven by a spirit of adventure, encouraged by your heartwarming stories, and inspired by the satisfaction of overcoming complex problems. Twenty-five years ago, when I took the path less traveled, the vision I had for GUE was admittedly ambitious. The reality, however, has exceeded anything I could have imagined. I know that GUE will never reach a point when it is complete but that it will be an exciting lifelong journey, one that, for me, will define a life well lived. I look forward our mutual ongoing “Quest for Excellence.”
See Listings Below For Additional Resources On GUE And GUE Diving!

Jarrod is an avid explorer, researcher, author, and instructor who teaches and dives in oceans and caves around the world. Trained as a geologist, Jarrod is the founder and president of GUE and CEO of Halcyon and Extreme Exposure while remaining active in conservation, exploration, and filming projects worldwide. His explorations regularly place him in the most remote locations in the world, including numerous world record cave dives with total immersions near 30 hours. Jarrod is also an author with dozens of publications, including three books.
A Few GUE Fundamentals
Similar to military, commercial and public safety divers, Global Underwater Explorers (GUE) is a standards-based diving community, with specific protocols, standard operating procedures (SOPs) and tools. Here are selected InDEPTH stories on some of the key aspects of GUE diving, including a four-part series on the history and development of GUE decompression procedures by founder and president Jarod Jablonski.

Anatomy of a Fundamentals Class
GUE Instructor Examiner Guy Shockey explains the thought and details that goes into GUE’s most popular course, Fundamentals, aka “Fundies,” which has been taken by numerous industry luminaries. Why all the fanfare? Shockey characterizes the magic as “simple things done precisely!

Back to Fundamentals: An Introduction to GUE’s Most Popular Diving Course
Instructor evaluator Rich Walker attempts to answer the question, “why is Fundamentals GUE’s most popular diving course?” Along the way, he clarifies some of the myths and misconceptions about GUE training. Hint: there is no Kool-Aid.

As you’d expect, Global Underwater Explorers (GUE) has a standardized approach to prepare your equipment for the dive, and its own pre-dive checklist: the GUE EDGE. Here explorer and filmmaker Dimitris Fifis preps you to take the plunge, GUE-style.

The Flexibility of Standard Operating Procedures
Instructor trainer Guy Shockey discusses the purpose, value, and yes, flexibility of standard operating procedures, or SOPs, in diving. Sound like an oxymoron? Shockey explains how SOPs can help offload some of our internal processing and situational awareness, so we can focus on the important part of the dive—having FUN!

Standard Gases: The Simplicity of Everyone Singing the Same Song
Like the military and commercial diving communities before them, Global Underwater Explorers (GUE) uses standardized breathing mixtures for various depth ranges and for decompression. Here British wrecker and instructor evaluator Rich Walker gets lyrical and presents the reasoning behind standard mixes and their advantages, compared with a “best mix” approach. Don’t worry, you won’t need your hymnal, though Walker may have you singing some blues.

Rules of Thumb: The Mysteries of Ratio Deco Revealed
Is it a secret algorithm developed by the WKPP to get you out of the water faster sans DCI, or an unsubstantiated decompression speculation promoted by Kool-Aid swilling quacks and charlatans? British tech instructor/instructor evaluator Rich Walker divulges the arcane mysteries behind GUE’s ratio decompression protocols in this first of a two part series.

The Thought Process Behind GUE’s CCR Configuration
Global Underwater Explorers is known for taking its own holistic approach to gear configuration. Here GUE board member and Instructor Trainer Richard Lundgren explains the reasoning behind its unique closed-circuit rebreather configuration. It’s all about the gas!

GUE and the Future of Open Circuit Tech Diving
Though they were late to the party, Global Underwater Explorers (GUE) is leaning forward on rebreathers, and members are following suit. So what’s to become of their open circuit-based TECH 2 course? InDepth’s Ashley Stewart has the deets.

Diving projects, or expeditions—think Bill Stone’s Wakulla Springs 1987 project, or the original explorations of the Woodville Karst Plain’s Project (WKPP)—helped give birth to technical diving, and today continue as an important focal point and organizing principle for communities like Global Underwater Explorers (GUE). The organization this year unveiled a new Project Diver program, intended to elevate “community-led project dives to an entirely new level of sophistication.” Here, authors Guy Shockey and Francesco Cameli discuss the power of projects and take us behind the scenes of the new program

Decompression, Deep Stops and the Pursuit of Precision in a Complex World In this first of a four-part series, Global Underwater Explorers’ (GUE) founder and president Jarrod Jablonski explores the historical development of GUE decompression protocols, with a focus on technical diving and the evolving trends in decompression research.