- The Human Stream
- Posts
- How are People the Solution?
In the previous two issues, we looked at some problems with the concept of human error in the light of new thinking on accident causation and safety. What practitioners often don’t realise is that by accepting human error as a causal explanation for something bad, we also make a deeper assumption - that humans are the problem.
Put differently, to accept human error as a root cause of any failure, we have to assume that systems are generally safe and the actions (or inactions) of humans make them unsafe. But is healthcare inherently safe? If things go as they are designed to go, can we expect highly reliable, ultra-safe care to result automatically? In all situations?
How we answer such questions reveal our deeper positions on safety and organisational performance. For practitioners, it might determine how willing you are to look at features of work design or to investigate information flows when things go wrong (even when errors are clearly in view). For leaders it might influence how readily you accept human failures as the cause of problematic safety performance.^
These types of shifts can have very practical implications on the actions we take.
^How we answer these types of questions will depend on our experiences, professional backgrounds, training and even worldview. If you feel challenged by some of the content in this newsletter, that can be a good thing but debriefing is vital. If you don’t have trusted peers to work through what these ideas mean for you, feel free to reach out to us and we can hook you into a support community.