Human error at the centre of the debate on safety

Abstract

This chapter focuses on the discovery of the safety model that is used by individuals in order to carry out their work without incidents or accidents. It offers a micro-level perspective on safety. The material here is a summary of a book on the management of high-risk systems published in 1996, with additional insights from the latest work on common forms of bias in error analysis and the importance of the concepts of adequacy, compromise, trade-off and the central role of routines.