Portfolio

Services

HF Partners advises international organizations and authorities, tailors and evaluates (digital) services, carries out research and offers further education and training courses.

We offer human-centered consulting services in security and safety, risk communication and conflict management. Our experts combine findings from decision research, cognitive psychology, behavioural economics and neuroscience with systems theory considerations and bring these together with practical experience from high-reliability organisations (HRO).

Contact us to to get a personalised offer.

Projects

HF Partners operates in close cooperation with universities and applied universities. We also initiate research projects that we are excited about.

Ongoing

2022 – 2025, in cooperation with Zurich State Police and Risk Dialog

A safe, attractive and efficient transport and traffic system is the basis of a functioning society. Incidents in air traffic have a severe and rapid impact on all areas of life. Airports and the surrounding infrastructure are therefore also attractive to actors with malicious intentions. For this reason, safety and security at airports has a special role to play.

The focus of the project is to better understand the communication, thought and decision-making processes of potential perpetrators. Second, the projects aim to deriving recommendations for the future design of security measures. HF Partners contributes its expertise from the definition of the content to the development of the study designs in all work packages of the project.

2024 – 2025, in cooperation with the Federal Office of Public Health, Tox Info Suisse and Federal Institute of Technology (ETH Zurich)
The Swiss Cheese model emphasises that accidents occur when multiple safety measures fail, or human error or mistakes are not prevented or mitigated by safeguards, tools or processes. In this project, we take on the system-based perspective of the Swiss Cheese model to improve the understanding of household accidents with chemical products (e.g., cleaning products).
 
HF Partners will carry out expert interviews with system stakeholders, analyse existing anonymous data from calls made to Tox Info Suisse and interview people that had accidents in their households.
 
The ultimate goal of the project is to work out recommendations to prevent household accidents in the future.
This project has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under agreement No. 101000494.

DECIDE, a five-year Horizon 2020 project, will develop data-driven decision support tools that offer robust and early signals of disease emergence and options for diagnostic confirmation. Moreover, options will be provided for controlling the disease along with their implications in terms of disease spread, economic burden and animal welfare.

HF Partners, together with the Consumer Behavior group at ETH Zurich, lead Work Package 5 – “Implementation and behavioural strategies for animal disease management.” The overall objective of WP5 is to determine the stakeholders’ drivers, barriers and willingness to share data and/or to implement and use data-driven decision tools for animal disease and animal welfare management.

Concluded

Concluded, in cooperation with presenta AG and Appenzeller Bahnen AG

HF Partners supported presenta AG in the development and evaluation of a confidential reporting and counselling centre for safety-critical incidents and psychosocial stress as part of a pilot project at Appenzeller Bahnen.

More information can be found here.

Concluded, in cooperation with the University of Zurich, University of Amsterdam and Zurich State Police

DETECT

Under the leadership of Franziska Hofer, the project investigated a method that has been very well researched in the laboratory, namely the Reaction Time Concealed Information Test (RT-CIT) in the context of aviation security. The method is based on the analysis of reaction times (RT) and differs fundamentally from other methods that analyse physiological parameters or non-verbal behaviour (e.g. facial expressions, gestures). The RT-CIT uses reaction times to measure whether someone is withholding information (e.g. information about an imminent crime or membership of an extremist network).

INTENT

This collaboration investigated the ability of strategic interviewing techniques to discriminate between true and false intentions in the aviation context. HF Partners supported the development and evaluation of a training programme on strategic interviewing techniques.

Both projects have beenn funded by the Federal Office of Civil Aviation (FOCA).

Concluded, in cooperation with the University of Zurich and Zurich State Police

Detection of suspicious people with hostile intentions as well as face recognition are important tasks in general policing as well as counter terrorism. Within the sub-project “behavior detection”, we investigated 

  1. whether offenders can be detected during the build-up phase of a criminal/terrorist act based on their nonverbal behavior,
  2. which abilities, skills and what kind of knowledge increase performance in this task and
  3. whether nonverbal behavioral cues can be identified that are related to hostile intentions

Within the sub-project “face recognition”, we

  1. developed a reliable and valid face recognition test to measure performance in unfamiliar face recognition
  2. studied different strategies to improve unfamiliar face recognition

This project has been lead by Franziska Hofer and has been funded by the Federal Office of Civil Aviation (FOCA).

Further Education and Training Courses

We develop customised training courses on site or online. You are also welcome to engage us as guest lecturers in your own course (e.g. BSc, MSc, CAS, MAS). In our training courses, we focus on a mix of content (e.g. theory, frontal teaching, documents), interactive parts (e.g. group work, discussions) and playful elements (e.g. pub quizzes, games).

See below our current selection of courses. We are also happy to customise the courses according to your needs (e.g. thematic focus, online or offline, languages: de, en, number of sessions and duration).

Contact us without obligation for more information.

Target group

Forensic experts, judges, public prosecutors, experts in forensic medicine and forensic psychiatry, investigators, lawyers

Content

In our training programme, you will learn why our brains are so susceptible to bias and how this bias affects the police and justice system. Effective strategies for dealing with bias will also be presented and there will be an opportunity to reflect on debiasing and decision hygiene together with the participants.

Target group

Engineers, toxicologists, professionals involved in risk and science communication, officials from regional, cantonal or federal authorities

Content

In this interactive course, the most important psychological foundations of public risk perception and their effects on risk communication are presented. These basics are applied to various relevant cases from the corresponding industry (e.g. health promotion and protection, security, technology acceptance, risk communication) and are analysed in interactive parts with regard to concrete implications for risk communication.

Target group

Healthcare staff, healthcare institutions, hospitals and medical practices

Content

Up until the first treatment, many groundbreaking decisions are made and communicated, and corresponding expectations are created; e.g. which symptoms are given more or less attention in the anamnesis interview, which additional examinations and treatments are initiated, whether other specialists are consulted or how risks and side effects as well as benefits and opportunities are explained.
Many of these decisions have to be made under time pressure or in stressful situations. In such situations, our brain falls back on unconscious rules of thumb (heuristics) that are efficient and have a complexity-reducing effect. These rules of thumb often lead to good results. However, this makes our brain susceptible to bias in complex and ambiguous situations. Experts and laypeople are equally affected by such biases in “autopilot mode”. Knowledge of the advantages and disadvantages of heuristics and conscious reflection reduce such biases. 

Design

After clarifying your individual needs, we design customised ½-day compact interdisciplinary workshops for your institution with keynote speeches, case discussions and peer counselling.

Selection of Clients / Project Partners