Error and the Accident

As a result of focusing on errors, permanent ambignities have become established in relation to the link between errors and accidents. The two terms are often confounded, and all errors are demonised in the qnest for an optimised cognitive system that works in a similar way to a machine. 

The strnctnral role of errors in solving problems has been minimised for twenty years. The accnmnlating evidence that operators make a large number of errors but recover the majority of them, has also been neglected. 

It is also too easy to forget that making errors (particularly routine errors) is the price that is paid for working quickly, and consequently the price of a degree of social and economic efficiency. The price to pay for seeking to control everything and avoid all errors is nsnally snch slowness in implementation that the most worrisome risk becomes that of not doing the work at all . 

It has therefore been necessary to await more favourable circumstances before starting the process of changing the dominant way of thinking about error, at least in the research domain. The industry has become aware of two recurrent problems in traditional approaches to safety (a) the accident rate reached a plateau despite optimising solutions to block errors [16, op. cit.] and (b) the use of increasing numbers of procedures to reduce the number of incidents and accidents has sown the seeds of reduced adaptability on the part of operators, so that they have lost part of their ability to manage risks. 

All the conditions were in place for a theoretical and practical shift in ideas about human reliability. In just a few years, the research landscape has changed and there has been in-depth revision of what is understood as good cognitive functioning. 

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