Accident Proneness Myth or Reality

Dekker in his text “The Field Guide to Understanding Human Error” states:

“Reactions to failure focus firstly and predominantly on those people who were closest to producing or potentially avoiding the mishap. It is easy to see these people as the engine of action. If it were not for them, the trouble would not have occurred.”

This statement by Dekker is intriguing, as it insinuates that people generally go out of their way to cause problems for an organisation. Could this be true? This kind of statement is easy to make, considering what one knows after-the-fact, it gives the impression that accidents are preventable. However, under every simple assumption about error, there is a much deeper more complex story. It is much easier to see the error as something that is local, or that is merely a problem of a few individuals, than change our beliefs about the system that made the event possible.

People generally want to do the right thing, and do a good job, as their livelihoods are on the line. The highlighting of errors made by well meaning people does not explain why the error occurred, or why they did what they did. Many professionals have a hard time coming to grips with human error; they experience fear, guilt, anger, embarrassment and humiliation when an error has occurred. They have difficulty in reporting errors because of litigation, and the feeling of incompetence. To add to this, there is the labelling of people that make an error as the “bad apples”. The Bad Apple Theory asserts the assumption that Systems that are complex would be fine if it were not for the unpredictable behaviour of some unreliable people or “bad apples”. Consequently, when an error occurs, managers will inspect and remove any “bad apple” from the system. However, removing the so called “bad apples” without at first discovering the flaws within the system is a formula for failure. Therefore, it is essential that a systems approach that focuses on the whole and not just the individual is implemented for the management and prevention of errors.