The field guide to understanding 'human error', a book by Sidney Dekker

Summary

When faced with a ‘human error’ problem, you may be tempted to ask 'Why didn’t these people watch out better?' Or, 'How can I get my people more engaged in safety?' You might think you can solve your safety problems by telling your people to be more careful, by reprimanding the miscreants, by issuing a new rule or procedure and demanding compliance. These are all expressions of 'The Bad Apple Theory' where you believe your system is basically safe if it were not for those few unreliable people in it.

Content

Building on its successful predecessors, the third edition of The Field Guide to Understanding ‘Human Error’ will help you understand a new way of dealing with a perceived 'human error' problem in your organisation. It will help you trace how your organisation juggles inherent trade-offs between safety and other pressures and expectations, suggesting that you are not the custodian of an already safe system. It will encourage you to start looking more closely at the performance that others may still call 'human error', allowing you to discover how your people create safety through practice, at all levels of your organisation, mostly successfully, under the pressure of resource constraints and multiple conflicting goals.

The Field Guide to Understanding 'Human Error' will help you understand:

• how to move beyond 'human error'
• how to understand accidents
• how to do better investigations
• how to understand and improve your safety work.

You will be invited to think creatively and differently about the safety issues you and your organisation face. In each, you will find possibilities for a new language, for different concepts, and for new leverage points to influence your own thinking and practice, as well as that of your colleagues and organisation.