“Human Beings are at once the best part and the worst part of our efforts to achieve a desired outcome. The opportunity lies in our ability to influence the ratio.” Tim Staton in Unnatural, Abnormal, Unnecessary
Brace yourself for a blinding flash of the obvious.
Humans make mistakes.
There is nothing new about this fact, it is as old as humans are. Philosophers, poets, playwrights and authors down through the ages have made much of human fallibility. I am going to spill a bit more ink on the topic mainly because with all that has been written, human error has not been “fixed”. We still make mistakes in very predictable ways and we still continue to blame bad outcomes on human error and consider it a sufficient explanation. Human error is not the end of the investigation, it is rather the beginning.
Human error is not an explanation…it’s an exclamation!
We have vulnerabilities in our system which allow us to come within one human error of a bad outcome at a critical or risk important place. If you lead an organization. and especially an organization in a high consequence environment, you cannot afford to operate without a strategy that addresses the potential of human error.You own the system! A common definition of human error is ” the unintentional deviation from a desired outcome”. The key word is “unintentional”. You will not be able to punish “unintentional deviations” out of your system because they did not intend to do them in the first place. Success and failure leave clues.
Understanding and addressing those clues is the work of those who practice Human Performance Improvement (HPI). As a leader, how are you “influencing the ratio” mentioned in the opening quote?
Stay tuned for more discussion on the topic and feel free to provide feedback.