Following Procedures Means Being Able to Deviate from them About an Average Point

Consequence Following Procedures Means Being Able to Deviate from them About an Average Point 

A naive vision of ideal cognition wants the operator to achieve greater safety and reduce errors, if he can only be induced to foUow the predetermined procedure to the letter, with no deviation at all. 

This expectation is extremely naive and it is never met, for at least two reasons  

The cognitive system is not really capable of managing its internal and external risks effectively without coming into contact with them seeking to forbid the operator to experience these risks and imposing a process on him that allows no deviation is nonsense in both psychological and eigonomic terms. 

Of course the benefit of this constant search for exposure to micro-scale variations in the environment in order to control them better only has its effect within an envelope of levels of risks (and errors) that are agreed and habitual (one might say everyday), in which the operator has the know-how to recover from these routinely. We are not talking about exposure to levels of risk that go beyond the competence of the operator or take him completely by surprise. 

---