Insights · Field Note
The Simplest Thing
Two experienced supervisors, quietly beaten by a Word document at 5:40am. In the age of AI, are we expecting too much of the frontline, or too little of ourselves?
I spent last week out on a job. Not consulting from a meeting room, not tuning a spreadsheet — actually standing on the deck watching supervisors do their jobs. I left humbled.
What I saw was this: two experienced supervisors, both good at their work, both quietly wrestling with a Word document. Not the content of the document — the document itself. Trying to make a comment box land in the right place. Trying to reopen the version they'd almost saved. Trying to find where the header ended and where their part started. The task they were being asked to do was governance; the task they were actually doing was Microsoft.
We talk a lot right now about the "age of AI." We assume the average person in industry has an LLM in their pocket and a copilot in their browser. Head office writes standards, forms, and templates as if the frontline is fluent in the tooling. Most of the frontline I meet is not. They didn't come up through knowledge work. They came up through hands, gauges, isolations, and radios. The gap between what we think happens with a document and what happens when a supervisor opens it at 5:40am under a headlight is bigger than we're honest about.
That gap is a safety issue too. If the person closest to the hazard can't easily record what they saw, the record we get is the one they could produce in the time they had — not the one they actually needed to write. We then treat that record as data. We roll it up. We brief it back to them as if it were the truth, and the loop closes on a fiction.
The simplest form usually wins
There is a lesson in this that I keep having to relearn. The most profound solutions in the field are almost always the simplest in form. A paper card in a shirt pocket. A single question at the toolbox: "what surprised you yesterday?" A form with three fields instead of thirty. A voice memo that someone else transcribes later. A supervisor who is trusted to text a photo and a sentence, and a system that treats that as the report.
AI can help with this. It can turn a voice note into a structured entry, a photo into a tagged observation, a rambling debrief into a clean action list. But only if we point it at making the frontline experience simpler, not the head office experience richer. Every time we add a field to a form because it would be "nice to analyse later," we are quietly pushing more work onto the person with the least time to do it.
So my question this week — for me as much as anyone reading — is honest. When was the last time you sat next to the person filling in your form? Not to train them. To watch, and to redesign the form around what you saw.
The simplest thing usually wins. We just have to be humble enough to notice it.
That's the starting point for ROC Advice's AI for HSE work: make the frontline's job simpler first, and let the reporting follow.
First published in The Field Note on LinkedIn.
