The strategic approach to improving human performance within safety embraces two (2) primary challenges:
- Anticipate, Prevent, Catch, and Recover from ACTIVE errors
- Identify and Eliminate LATENT organizational weaknesses that provoke human error and degrade controls against error and the consequences of error
Preventable errors will not be eliminated if opportunities to err are not methodically identified. Even if opportunities to err are systematically identified and prevented, people may still err in unanticipated and creative ways. Consequently, additional means are necessary to protect against errors that are not prevented or anticipated. Reducing the error rate minimizes the FREQUENCY but NOT the SEVERITY of events.