Chapanis, Alphonse

Chapanis, Alphonse. To Communicate the Human Factors Message, You Have to Know What the Message Is and How to Conununicate It. Human Factors Society Bulletin, November 1991. 

Chapanis, Alphonse. The Error-Provocative Situation. In The Measurement of Safely Performance. William E. Tarrants, ed. New York Garland Publishing, 1980. 

Chapanis, Alphonse. The Error-Provocative Situation . In The Measurement of Safety Performance, edited by William E. Tarrants. New York Garland Publishing, 1980. Guidelines for Preventing Human Error in Process Safety. New York Center for Chemical Process Safety of the American Institute of Chemical Engineers, 1994. 

In Chapter 19, Applied Ergonomics Significance and Opportunity, I refer to an article by Alphonse Chapanis titled To Communicate the Human Factors Message, You Have to Know What the Message Is and How to Communicate It. One of his themes is that human factors engineering has to be defined and its practitioners must know what it is to be able to communicate about it successfully. Safety professionals have the same need. 

Allied to Deming s view is the work of Alphonse Chapanis, who was prominent in the field of ergonomics and human factors engineering. Representative of Chapanis writings is The Error-Provocative Situation, a chapter in The Measurement of Safety Performance, by William E. Tarrants (Tarrants, p. 119). 

Alphonse Chapanis is exceptionally well known in ergonomics and human factors engineering circles, and his writings on avoiding the design of work that is error-provocative are often cited. These are excerpts from his chapter titled The Error-Provocative Situation, which is in the book The Measurement of Safety Performance ... 

To extend that idea, this example is quoted from an essay written by Alphonse Chapanis and titled The Error-Provocative Situation A Central Measurement Problem in Human Factors Engineering. It is in the book The Measurement of Safety Performance by Dr. William E. Tarrants. 

Another researcher and often published author whose work has influenced this author s view of incident causation is Dr. Alphonse Chapanis. He was exceptionally well known in ergonomics and human factors engineering circles. His work is often quoted, particularly on the benefits of considering the capabilities and limitations of workers as systems are designed. Chapanis was strong on designing to avoid error-provocative work methods. 

This author spoke on Designing Out the Error-Provocative at the previously mentioned ASSE symposium. Alphonse Chapanis (1980) coined the phrase error provocative. He was the author of a chapter titled The Error-Provocative Situation in the book The Measurement of Safety Performance. His premise—one which design engineers could profitably adopt— was that if the design of the workplace or the work methods is error provocative, it is a near certainty that human errors will occur. An error-provocative situation is one that almost literally invites people to commit errors. Note that the premise applies to both the workplace and the work methods. 

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