Human Factors means HUMANS making decisions- OUR roles as safety professionals is to chart a path to SUCESS IN SAFETY, rather than hoping they avoid failure. Safety is NOT about luck. Safety is the confidence that there is a path to safety success – CULTURE is convincing the workers that the best path is the […]
Human Factors mean HUMANS making decisions- OUR role as safety professionals is to chart a path to SUCESS IN SAFETY, rather than hoping they avoid failure. Safety is NOT about luck, safety is having the confidence that there is a path to success – CULTURE is convincing the workers that the best path is the
As the trial involving the fatal crash of Air France Flight 447 begins today, prosecutors will argue that Air France (the airline flying the plane) and Airbus (the manufacturer of the plane) are liable for their role in the fatal 2009 crash. Both companies face charges of manslaughter and negligence in the incident that killed
A traditional view of events and accidents is that they are caused by human competence, attention, or attitude shortcomings. It may be under the label of “loss of situation awareness,” “procedural violation,” or “poor management”. A new and different view is that human error is NOT the cause of failure but a SYMPTOM OF FAILURE
I want to share a perfect failure scenario that happened to me and has been happening to me since April 2021. And yes, I see the world through the lens of a safety engineer – hate me for it if you must. The failure is 99% my fault for trusting a simple financial tool via
As my year comes to a close on the railroad, I recently has a discussion with a senior manager about ALARP, a new acronym for the RR. The manager wanted to know more about using the Hierarchy of Controls to reduce risks; more specifically, how we would reduce the SEVERITY of the consequence of an
In his 2018 book, Risk-Based Thinking – Managing the Uncertainty of Human Error in Operations, Muschara has a passage that hits a home run in how human error is viewed in American society and why this view of human error is so difficult to break through… (p.39)
I am betting most everyone has heard the old phrase, “that’s an accident waiting to happen.” My brother (also a safety engineer) and I have pondered whether our father, who used that phrase often, influenced our career choices more than we had ever imagined. But how many safety professionals understand what this phrase is saying?
Although it may be possible to accept that errors are neither as numerous nor as varied as they might first appear, the idea of a predictable error is a much harder one to swallow. If errors were indeed predictable, we would surely take steps to avoid them. Yet they still occur. So what is a
Assigning probability values to errors is still very much an art form. Nonetheless, there is sufficient general agreement about the likelihood of errors occurring in various generic tasks to put them into sensible rank order. Their main use is to provide benchmarks for the range of error probabilities over different jobs.Here is a list of
Unsafe acts are of two (2) distinct types: Errors and Violations Errors arise from informational problems and fall into three categories:
