The Human Contribution: Unsafe Acts, Accidents and Heroic Recoveries
| Author | : | |
| Rating | : | 4.40 (579 Votes) |
| Asin | : | 0754674029 |
| Format Type | : | paperback |
| Number of Pages | : | 310 Pages |
| Publish Date | : | 2013-11-23 |
| Language | : | English |
DESCRIPTION:
'The serious reader will find the book intensely moving at times. The wealth of real case studies, tragedies, splendid successes and discoveries, make it well balanced and difficult to put down. Certainly it merits repeated reading for continuous satisfaction and inspiration.' --Occupational Safety & Health, May 2009
S. D. E. Diekstra said Reason's modesty is an essential contribution to the risk management debate. James Reason's importance in shaping the current view on safety and accidents cannot be overstated. I could not agree more with this claim on the back cover of his latest book. The accident causation model that has brought Mr. Reason global fame, the Swiss cheese model, is at the foundation of most of the risk analysis models in use today.The Human Contribution adds further to James' work but it also summarises a lot of his previous work. On the theoretical side, James describes some new risk models and comments on recent development. Lobke Van Mierlo said A must for any Safety professional. James Reason's books, Human Error, Managing the Risks of Organizational Accidents and now The Human Contribution should be a mandatory reading for anyone concerned with safety performance. This book is easy to read and takes us from the Human as hazard to the Human as hero and gives valuable insights. Also the Knotted Rubber band model is an important contribution to understand that safety performance is constantly drifting to either side of the desired safety level and emphasises the importance of staying on top of what is going on.. Well worth the money It's hard to add to the very comprehensive review by S. D. E. Diekstra. So here are just a few personal observations:* The first part of the book is devoted to a series of lists and definitions. Worthy and academically rigorous but, well, dull.* There is some interesting theory, particularly around the author's "swiss cheese" model.* The examples or "case studies" take up a fair part of the book and begin to look suspiciously like padding. They could easily be drawn from Wikipedia or similar sources. Much more detail than necessary.*
All students of human factors - however seasoned - will also find it an invaluable and thought-provoking read.. However there is another perspective that has been relatively little studied in its own right - the human as hero, whose adaptations and compensations bring troubled systems back from the brink of disaster time and again. What, if anything, did these situations have in common? Can these human abilities be ’bottled’ and passed on to others? The Human Contribution is vital reading for all professionals in high-consequence environments and for managers of any complex system. The book draws its illustrative material from a wide variety of hazardous domains, with the emphasis on healthcare reflecting the author’s focus on patient safety over the last decade. Usually the human is considered a hazard - a system component whose unsafe acts are implicated in the majority of catastrophic breakdowns. This book explores the human contribution to the reliability and resilience of complex, well-defended systems
His primary research interest has been the human and organizational contributions to the breakdown of complex, well-defended systems. In 2006, he was made an honorary fellow of the Royal College of General Practitioners. He received the Distinguished Foreign Colleague Award from the US Human Factors and Ergonomics Society (1995), the Flight Safety Foundation/Airbus Industrie Award for achievements in human factors and flight safety (2001), and the Roger Green Medal from the Royal Aeron