Somewhere midway through Human Error, James Reason (what an excellent name for someone of his profession, by the way!) quotes another author: "When we are studying an uninteresting subject, if our mind tends to wander, we have to bring back our attention every now and then by using distinct pulses of effort, which revivify the topic for a moment, the mind then running on for a certain number of seconds or minutes with spontaneous interest, until again some intercurrent idea captures it and takes it off."
This is probably the best summary of this book I could come up with, unfortunately.
While Reason's points about human error form in many respects an interesting read, the book is so densely written as to be un-recommendable for most casual readers. I find myself yearning for the light and airy "Thinking: Fast and Slow" by Kahneman instead of the heavy passages that Reason exposes us to.
It is, without a doubt, a well-researched book that covers some interesting ideas: the differences between skill, rule or knowledge-based errors (i.e. ranging from small slips like pouring your tea in the sugar holder instead of the teacup all the way down to latent, massive design errors in nuclear power plant systems), the Swiss cheese model of accident causation, the fact that technology has made our systems less prone to operator errors (many but fixable) but rather more prone to design errors (few but hard to recover from) and so on.
However, these ideas are presented in such a bland and difficult to digest way, that the casual reader may struggle (like I did) to properly appreciate them. It is perhaps not Reason's fault: this book was written in the late 1980s, before the self-help industry truly came into its own, and it is admittedly targeted more towards academics.
Towards the end of the book, Reason explains that "human supervisory control was not conceived with humans in mind." I'll cheekily bastardize that phrase to sum up my views of Human Error as "reading this book was not conceived with the reader in mind" unfortunately, which dramatically limits its reach.
ISBN-13: 978-0521314190
ISBN-10: 0521314194
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BikeMan
The definitive guide to human error
Reviewed in the United Kingdom 🇬🇧 on December 21, 2005
