For most senior safety professionals, we have arrived at a place in our careers where we can understand the significance of what Dr. Reason said in 1997. Although most would agree, we started our careers in a very different place when it comes to how we derived the root causes of accidents throughout our careers. But when Dr. Reason stated this in 1997, it was not well received; especially at the time when Behavior Based Safety was taking hold in industrial workplaces. Still, to this day, we will see well-educated, certified, and seasoned safety pros struggle with this fact of “human error.” Some will retire, having never accepted this premise of human error management.
Here is an excerpt from Managing the risks of organizational accidents, Reason, 1997.
(emphasis by me)