Dekker on Error!

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Who is he?

Those who do not know Dekker. He is Sidney Dekker, a professor and researcher in the field of safety science. He has written several books on the topic of human-error, Safety Culture, and Safety Systems. He has worked with various industries, including aviation, healthcare, and nuclear power, to improve safety and prevent #accidents.

Here, we are discussing one of his books “The Field Guide to Understanding Human Error”. The book explores the concept of human error and its impact on safety in various industries, including aviation.

Critical Concept

The book argument is that human error is ‘not a personal failure, but rather a symptom of deeper systemic issues within organisations’. How about that?!

If organisations refuse to initially accept the above statement, then there is no moving forward with the discussion!!

So, let’s go along and accept it.

Dekker provides a framework for understanding human error and offers practical strategies for preventing and managing it. He emphasises the importance of creating a culture of safety that encourages reporting and learning from errors rather than blaming individuals.

How to Manage “Human Factors” in Airline Industry?

Before you continue!

If you have reached here, I have to tell you that overall the book is a good reference for anyone interested in improving safety in organisation. However, you may find it too technical and you may struggle to apply some concepts in your industry or context.

So let’s just summarise some important lessons.

Lessons Learnt

“The Field Guide to Understanding Human Error” provides several lessons, they include:

1. Human error is not a personal failure; Therefore, blaming individuals for errors is not an effective way to prevent them. The reason is that human error is a symptom of deeper systemic issues within organisations.
2. Create a culture of safety: Organisations should create a culture that encourages reporting and learning from errors. This means creating an environment where individuals feel comfortable reporting errors without fear of punishment!
3. Understand the context of errors: the emphasis here is on the importance of understanding the context in which an error occurs. Simply, we should be looking beyond the cause of the error and broadly examine the system.
4. Learn from errors: this is hard to accept, but in a learning organisation, errors should used as an opportunity to learn and improve cultures and systems. Investigations should be very thorough to understand the root causes of errors and implementing changes to prevent them from happening again. Safety departments must play a big role in this as it is responsible to spread the safety culture.
5. Embrace complexity: Dekker argues that complex systems such as Aviation are normally unpredictable and that organisations should embrace this complexity rather than trying to simplify it. This sounds deep, but actually it is very simple. Organisations should recognise that errors will occur no matter what ! Therefore, we should focus on managing errors rather than trying to completely eliminate.

Finally, it is important to highlight that the book does not fully address the role of individual responsibility in preventing human error. However, with proper implementation of SMS, all employees should know their roles.

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Greetings from #AbuDhabi , #UAE

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