Since the 1980s, Active and Latent failures have been a major part of Human Factors Engineering, we have all done it at some point in our careers… an accident happens, and we go straight to the obvious ACTIVE FAILURES and point to those as the sole cause of the incident; until one day a more senior safety engineer schools you on the LATENT FAILURES involved in the accident. There is a ton of studies on this matter, but the founder of ACTIVE and LATENT FAILURES was Dr. James Reason. He explained these principles in accident causation like this:
Latent failures set up the active failures that lead to consequences
