This article emphasizes the need for understanding, empathy, and compassion for staff involved in critical incidents when reviewing and investigating their response to threats or violence.

There’s a well-known movie called Sully, starring Tom Hanks as the pilot of the “Miracle on the Hudson” flight that went down with zero casualties. Chesley “Sully” Sullenberger was celebrated unlike almost any other hero I had seen up to that point in my life—talk shows, guest appearances, parades, parties, galas, concerts. The message was clear: this man saved lives, and we were grateful.

However, in the movie—released years later—we are shown a very different side of Sully’s journey. Most notably, we see the investigation conducted by the National Transportation Safety Board into his decision to land the aircraft in the Hudson River rather than turn back and attempt a landing over New York City skyscrapers, in a post-9/11 world.

At the conclusion of the inquiry, the panel informs Sully and his co-pilot that test pilots were able to simulate a successful landing by turning the plane around. Sully and his co-pilot step outside the hearing room, take a few deep breaths, and try to settle themselves after what feels like a deeply tone-deaf exchange with armchair quarterbacks—people seemingly more offended by the risk Sully took than the outcome of zero lives lost.

Sully returns to the inquiry and asks a simple but powerful question: “How many times did you run this simulation before a successful landing?”

The answer was seventeen. Seventeen times.

Sully then makes the point that matters most: you cannot simulate the human factor.

I share this story frequently in leadership training, particularly in public safety settings, because it underscores a core reality of high-risk work. Rather than debating broader issues, I am inviting leaders, managers, and other corrections professionals—especially those responsible for guiding staff through the aftermath of a major incident—to reflect on the role of the human factor in decision-making under pressure.

Before going further, I strongly encourage you to find the clip I’m referencing online and watch it for context—or better yet, watch the entire film.

Recently, my boss asked me to try to define the “human factor” for her during a conversation about this very issue. I knew exactly what it was, but the moment I had to explain it out loud, I struggled to find the right words to capture it. Something that felt so intuitive suddenly became difficult to articulate.
The best definition I could offer was this: the human factor is everything a training scenario cannot fully simulate, capture or measure.

It’s heart rate.
It’s adrenaline.
It’s panic rising in your chest.
It’s smells.
It’s sounds—or the sudden absence of sound.
It’s the threat of things that were never present or planned for in training.

I then tried to ground the definition of the human factor in a corrections-centric example. It’s crowd dynamics—the stance and posture of other incarcerated individuals gathered around another incarcerated person who has become escalated. It’s the number of staff on shift who are actually able to respond. It’s the past history of both the staff member and the incarcerated person. It’s tone of voice. Proximity.
It’s my perception of risk.
It’s my expectation of possible outcomes given the circumstances—injury, violence, death—mine or someone else’s?
It’s my knowledge of policy and practice layered on top of my level of experience.
It’s my confidence in myself and my trust in the people around me.

And all of this is being processed—not over minutes or hours—but in milliseconds, sometimes in life-threatening conditions, with the goal being my frantically attempting to decide what is my best course of action in that situation.

Layered on top of that is another reality we don’t talk about enough: my awareness thatsomeone who has never been in a remotely similar situation may later sit in a calm room, with time, distance, and hindsight, and assess my decision.

That is the human factor.

And historically, it has not been treated as a critical element in after-action reviews. Even now, many people are uncomfortable acknowledging just how much influence it has on outcomes. Instead, the conversation often defaults to a single question:
“Did you follow your training?”

We trained you this way. We taught you this process.
In that split-second moment, did you execute the exact step-by-step procedure?

And let’s be clear—we are not talking about how to search a cell or run a line. We are talking about life-safety decisions. Use-of-force incidents. The moments when everything has gone sideways and the stakes are real.

Now that we’ve defined the human factor, let’s talk about what we do with it as supervisors and agency leaders.

What happens after the incident—after we’ve come down from the ceiling and it’s time to shift back into operational mode from crisis management? What steps are we taking to protect employees from additional trauma or moral injury?

For the purpose of this article, I am talking strictly about our response—not about an employee’s level of accountability. I am aware of the quiet but persistent culture that suggests “staff wellness ignores accountability.” In fact, if memory serves, I’ve written about that very misconception before.

Training is essential in corrections. It is often advanced and increasingly evidence-based. But let’s be real: even the most sophisticated training cannot measure or eliminate the human factor. We can attempt to mitigate it, but we cannot remove it. And yet, our post-incident reviews often scrutinize decisions as if the human factor should have been non-existent or could have been neutralized entirely.

Employees are often at their most vulnerable during investigative processes. In the corrections profession, there is growing concern—based on lived experience and anecdotal evidence—that some suicides may be linked, in part, to how investigations unfold. Staff are frequently carrying the weight of a critical incident itself, compounded by guilt or shame about their own actions or those of their team, fear of legal consequences and job security, and profound isolation created by investigative procedures. When these pressures converge without adequate support, they can severely destabilize individuals emotionally and elevate the risk for serious mental health crises.

Leaders, it is time to think more critically about the human factor if we are to support staff through some of the harshest moments of their careers—helping them survive not only physically, but emotionally—and ultimately choose to remain in this profession.

Because at the end of the day, we are all human.