The Field Guide to Understanding Human Error
This latest edition of The Field Guide to Understanding ‘Human Error' will help you understand how to move beyond 'human error'; how to understand accidents; how to do better investigations; how to understand and improve your safety work. You will be invited to think creatively and differently about the safety issues you and your organization face. In each, you will find possibilities for a new language, for different concepts, and for new leverage points to influence your own thinking and practice, as well as that of your colleagues and organization.
Stats for nerds
23recommend
57mentions
30people
2015–2026years
81% recommend19% neutral
Mentions per year
What Hacker News says
- And even if it _was_ related to AI, they would not admit it. First course of action is to blame user/programmer error and then QA process error. You shall not blame the golden calf. I am half serious and half not. But I do recommend reading the book "The Field Guide to Understanding 'Human Error'" in conjunction with my hyperbole.
- I am currently reading Thinking in Systems by Meadows, and the book has been terrific so far.
Also, as an avid fan of aviation, I enjoyed reading Field Guide to Understanding Human Error by Dekker and found it super applicable to designing software systems.
Can you think of any other similar books on systems and their reliability?
I know there's a book from MIT called Engineering a Safer World, which might be what I'm looking for, but I have been delaying it due to its impressive volume of almost 600 pages.
- This 1000 times. It takes courage to open up to mistakes. As a relatively young industry, we have a lot to learn still to move away from the instinctive blaming culture surrounding such failures. In this case, it's only a file being downloaded a couple of times, nobody died or got injured.
For those interested in this topic, and how other industries (e.g. Airline industry) deal with learning from or preventing failure: Sidney Dekker is the authority in this domain. Things like Restorative Just Culture, or Field guide to understanding human error could one day apply to our industry as well: https://sidneydekker.com/books.
- This comment is your periodic HN plug for "The Field Guide to Understanding Human Error" - https://www.amazon.com/Field-Guide-Understanding-Human-Error...
- Read The Field Guide to Understanding Human Error by Sidney Dekker. In manufacturing, it’s always a perfect storm because of the variation of Murphy’s Law that’s usually in effect: Everything that can go wrong, usually goes right.
- Exactly. See Sidney Dekker's Field Guide to Understanding Human Error. The posters do (almost) nothing -- other than covering the backside of those who put them up, and doing safety theatre. Looks good, does nothing for safety.
The same author, Sidney Dekker, has a very good book about how to deal with someone like this whistleblower. It's called "Just Culture". Well worth a read. Spolier: It's not to silence them, not this way. You can silence the person by, you know, actually doing something useful. But that requires actual change, and more importantly, a change in attitude. And you need to convince the crowds that you are doing better by NOT putting up posters. You'll be surprised how many people really think the posters help.
