Crista Vesel, MSc

14 Paseo del Prado 
Santa Fe, NM 87506 

Email: DynamicInquiry@hotmail.com 
Phone: 505-699-9340 

Crista Vesel owns and manages Dynamic Inquiry LLC, a consulting and coaching business that encourages questions like, “what if safety is more than a lack of accidents?” Specialists help organizations to shift focus away from simplistic causality toward understanding how a network of influences surrounds all human actions/decisions in complex systems. An exploration of the power and pitfalls of language is used to help organizations recognize how language is a strong component of social construction. Thus, Dynamic Inquiry looks beyond the traditional label of ‘human error’ by seeking a broader understanding of the context that surrounds human decisions and actions. This helps organizations to value error as an opportunity to learn instead of a fault in their systems. 

Ms. Vesel’s academic accomplishments include a Bachelor’s Degree in Communications and Philosophy from the University of New Mexico in 1992. She completed her Master’s Degree of Science in Human Factors and Systems Safety in 2012, at Lund University, Sweden, under the supervision of Professor Sidney Dekker. 

Ms. Vesel’s graduate research included the philosophy of accident theory, the history of accident model analysis, and the impact of language on learning. Her Master’s thesis, “Language Bias in Accident Investigation” showed that language is critical to wildland firefighting operations – and also to the analysis of accidents. Cognitive economy and simple taxonomical categorization answer some questions around accidents but fall short of understanding the complex nature of work. When cognitive economy, or simple taxonomy are used to socially construct meaning around an accident, the context around the event suffers and complexity is oversimplified. This can result in an increase of bias in accident investigators, increased blame of people involved in the event, and reduced learning from the event. See the entire thesis here: http://lup.lub.lu.se/student-papers/record/2971193 

New publication:
Dr. Ivan Pupulidy and Crista Vesel have a new publication released by the U.S. Chemical Safety Board last month. It is about a Learning Review on dust hazards and accidents through a worldwide Call to Action released by the CSB. The Learning Review Process was created by Ivan for his PhD dissertation (2015). This published Learning Review was greatly influenced by Ken and Mary Gergen’s work on Social Construction, which we incorporated to reveal learning opportunities by looking at multiple perspectives of people in industries that contain dust hazards. We captured these perspectives through quotes and show the diversity of ideas and paths for future growth of knowledge.

Press release: https://www.csb.gov/csb-issues-new-type-of-safety-product-entitled-dust-hazard-learning-review/

Here is a direct link to the PDF of the publication: 

https://www.csb.gov/assets/1/6/dust_hazard_review.pdf