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The Demand for Safety and Its Paradoxes Read chapter Read first chapter

2013 | OriginalPaper | Chapter

2. Human Error at the Centre of the Debate on Safety

Author : René Amalberti

Published in: Navigating Safety

Publisher: Springer Netherlands

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Abstract

This chapter focuses on the discovery of the safety model that is used by individuals in order to carry out their work without incidents or accidents. It offers a micro-level perspective on safety. The material here is a summary of a book on the management of high-risk systems published in 1996, with additional insights from the latest work on common forms of bias in error analysis and the importance of the concepts of adequacy, compromise, trade-off and the central role of routines.

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previous chapter The Demand for Safety and Its Paradoxes
next chapter The Keys to a Successful Systemic Approach to Risk Management
Footnotes
1
Jens Rasmussen is a visionary engineer, self-taught in human factors, who is capable of reading and bridging different streams of theory that are mutually unaware of each other. He refocused his career on technical and human reliability after the nuclear accident which occurred at Three Mile Island in the United States in March 1979. He was to become one of the pioneers of modern approaches to safety in complex systems and went on to have a profound influence on a whole generation of researchers who studied directly under him, such as James Reason, Erik Hollnagel, Dave Woods, and… the author of this book.
 
2
James Reason was Professor at the University of Manchester for many years, and is now retired; he is no doubt the best-known theoretical author on human error. He has published a number of works, one of which is the reference work on this subject; he was strongly influenced by Jens Rasmussen, with whom he worked closely in the mid-1980s.
 
3
When translating, one must be aware of false friends: these may be referred to as FAULTS in English, but the translation into French should not be FAUTE (which has too many connotations) but ERREUR DE CONNAISSANCE.
 
4
Read the very good commentary by Dave Woods on hindsight bias in the enquiry on the Columbia shuttle accident http://​researchnews.​osu.​edu/​archive/​hindbias.​htm.
 
5
The terms “mental model” and “mental representation” are synonymous and may be interchanged.
 
6
The term “affordance” is a neologism, originally coined in English, which means the idea of inciting or inviting action. It relates to a physical structure in the environment that spontaneously favours a specific action on that physical structure (for example pushing or pulling a door, depending on the shape of the handle (see Norman [41] for a development of the concept inspired by Gibson).
 
7
In the example of air traffic control, the radar screen provides a zoom view of the situation in which aircraft take several minutes to cross the screen from one side to the other; the screen also has distance reference markers shown as concentric circles, making it easier to position the aircraft in relation to each other.
 
8
In the majority of major high-risk industries (nuclear industry, transport etc.) the disaster rate is below 1 per 1 million (1 × 106) units of activity measurement (for example airport movements, or passenger-kilometres by rail).
 
9
The term “copying” is used metaphorically here to express the idea of a student's copy that is submitted to his master.
 
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Metadata
Title
Human Error at the Centre of the Debate on Safety
Author
René Amalberti
Copyright Year
2013
Publisher
Springer Netherlands
Book
Navigating Safety

Print ISBN: 978-94-007-6548-1

Electronic ISBN: 978-94-007-6549-8

Copyright Year: 2013

DOI
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-007-6549-8_2