Ten Questions About Human Error: A New View of Human Factors and System Safety

by Sidney Dekker, Barry H. Kantowitz (Editor)

Ten Questions About Human Error asks the type of questions frequently posed in incident and accident investigations, people's own practice, managerial and organizational settings, policymaking, classrooms, Crew Resource Management Training, and error research. It is one installment in a larger transformation that has begun to identify both deep-rooted constraints and new leverage points of views of human factors and system safety. The ten questions about human error are not just questions about human error as a phenomenon, but also about human factors and system safety as disciplines, and where they stand today. In asking these questions and sketching the answers to them, this book attempts to show where current thinking is limited--where vocabulary, models, ideas, and notions are constraining progress. This volume looks critically at the answers human factors would typically provide and compares/contrasts them with current research insights. Each chapter provides directions for new ideas and models that could perhaps better cope with the complexity of the problems facing human error today. As such, this book can be used as a supplement for a variety of human factors courses.

240 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 2004

About the author

Sidney W. A. Dekker (born 1969, "near Amsterdam"),is a Professor at Griffith University in Brisbane, Australia, where he founded the Safety Science Innovation Lab. He is also Honorary Professor of Psychology at the University of Queensland.

Previously, Dekker was Professor of human factors and system safety at Lund University in Sweden,where he founded the Leonardo da Vinci Laboratory for Complexity and Systems Thinking, and flew as First Officer on Boeing 737s for Sterling and later Cimber Airlines out of Copenhagen. Dekker is a high-profile scholar and is known for his work in the fields of human factors and safety.

Reviews

[Matthew Horvat · Rating 4 out of 5]

The story that we tell ourselves about what is going on around us help us explain our situation and further our action with progress towards goals. What is the story of someone who causes an accident? Surely they believed that what they were doing was doing whatever was best for them at the time. And was this wrong?

Ten Questions About Human Error: A New View of Human Factors and System Safety deals with this and other critical questions that come up during your first exploration of the New View of safety. Much progress has been made in the way of safety - we more often attribute systemic reasons for failure and choose a path of learning. Yet, the criminalization of accidents happens. And the organization punishes.

Should we hold a person accountable?
Can we hold a person accountable while blaming them for failure?
Can we hold a person accountable while learning from the failure?

Should we?

This and 9 other questions make up the 10 chapters. Get the book. Read it and others like it. It is a life a stake.