“Errors have very little in common”
Did you check Part 1 of my interview with Steven Shorrock?
Steven doesn’t mean people don’t make mistakes – people, of course, forget things, misperceive, misjudge, or press wrong buttons.
One problem is treating ‘error’ as some monolithic cause, where it often becomes a convenient stop rule in investigations. If a train driver didn’t brake when expected, the system also failed to act in time.
And what if the task had never been assessed for its safety-critical consequences, risk assessments were generic or incomplete, or weak consideration of human factors?
As such, organisational weaknesses permeate all aspects of work and affects everybody.
Human error, then, tends to lump everything together even when they’re psychologically unrelated.
We unpack:
· Using neutral language like ‘teamwork’ over ‘poor teamwork’
· How trade-offs push organisations for efficiency, but after an accident we blame people for not being thorough
· How frontline workarounds keeps work..um, working, but leaves the issues in-situ, like unmaintained equipment, so the system becomes more brittle
· Why many human factors methods seem quite reductive, and why systems approaches seem to be rarely taught in Human Factors degrees
Check out Steve’s blog: https://humanisticsystems.com/
Audio-only:
Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/episode/7hGiSzzluiRhadHimkUlS5?si=uk5b-0emTXCL_dKQ-5TPMg
#humanfactors #safetyscience #ergonomics #whs #ohs #workplacesafety
