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Review
'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
Product Description
The purpose of this book is to explore the human contribution to both the reliability and resilience of complex well-defended systems. The predominant mode of treating this topic is to consider the human as a hazard, a system component whose unsafe acts are implicated in the majority of catastrophic breakdowns. But there is another perspective, one that has been relatively little studied in its own right, and that is the human as hero, a system element whose adaptations and compensations have brought troubled systems back from the brink of disaster on a significant number of occasions. What, if anything, did these heroes have in common? Can these abilities be 'bottled' and passed on to others?Insightful, eloquent and extremely accessible, James Reason provides the reader with an essential guide to human behaviour on individual and organisational levels, examining the human from both perspectives.
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Most Helpful Customer Reviews
9 of 10 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback
Like many people I've used aspects of the work of James Reason - in particular his Swiss Cheese Model, and at the same time heard some very experienced people criticise him for his over-simplification of various safety and human factors issues.
So, I decided that this was my entry point into trying to understand him better. And a very worthwhile entry point it is too.
In large part, what I felt was going on as I read this book was that Professor Reason: clearly a very eminent scholar in the field of human factors and human error, was leading me by the hand through his own understanding of the major issues of human factors, together with how he reached that level of understanding of that.
And a deep understanding it is - he shows very well the function and nature of the human being in safety critical systems, both as "hero" - compensating for the deficiencies of the management system or equipment, and in some cases retrieving a situation from the point of disaster, and as the weak point whose deficiencies lead to many problems. For anybody either studying safety and/or human factors, or managing in a safety critical environment, I'd regard this as an excellent and worthwhile read.
It has a few minor deficiencies - the introductory couple of chapters are a bit dry compared to the more readable later material, the diagrams are rarely all that impressive, and whilst it certainly appears to me that there are lessons here for a whole range of non-safety-critical management issues, Prof. Reason doesn't tend to point this out. But, this is quibbling and doesn't stop me giving the book five stars.
So, I decided that this was my entry point into trying to understand him better. And a very worthwhile entry point it is too.
In large part, what I felt was going on as I read this book was that Professor Reason: clearly a very eminent scholar in the field of human factors and human error, was leading me by the hand through his own understanding of the major issues of human factors, together with how he reached that level of understanding of that.
And a deep understanding it is - he shows very well the function and nature of the human being in safety critical systems, both as "hero" - compensating for the deficiencies of the management system or equipment, and in some cases retrieving a situation from the point of disaster, and as the weak point whose deficiencies lead to many problems. For anybody either studying safety and/or human factors, or managing in a safety critical environment, I'd regard this as an excellent and worthwhile read.
It has a few minor deficiencies - the introductory couple of chapters are a bit dry compared to the more readable later material, the diagrams are rarely all that impressive, and whilst it certainly appears to me that there are lessons here for a whole range of non-safety-critical management issues, Prof. Reason doesn't tend to point this out. But, this is quibbling and doesn't stop me giving the book five stars.
4 of 6 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback
A very good book, well recommended and a nice little extension to his Swiss Cheese Model along with a degree of convergence with Sidney Dekker. Some justification as to why his work should be considered more of a systematic approach as opposed to the more epidemiological slant sometimes attributed to it.
4 of 6 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback
Discusses the idea that we should stop simply looking at human's as a 'hazard' subverting 'the system' but also look at them as 'heros' that save the system when all else fails. There are some interesting case studies to make the point and just a few weeks after this book was published there was the A320 distching in the Hudson...
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Most Recent Customer Reviews
Humans and errors
I read this book because I work in healthcare and risk management is a major part of my job. It was facinating to read how incidents can occur and what consequences there can be... Read more
Published on 31 Dec 2009 by Yusuf Gray
Well worth reading
Author of the Swiss cheese model. Goes much further and although it has a lot about hospitals and aircraft industry it is suitable for any high hazard industry. Read more
Published on 25 Oct 2009 by R. Newton
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