Book Review: The Field Guide to Understanding 'Human Error' by Sidney Dekker ★★★★☆

This is such a useful book. It makes the case that there's no such thing as "human error" - instead most catastrophes are caused by system issues, misaligned incentives, and unrealistic processes. You are not the custodian of an otherwise safe system that you need to protect from erratic human beings. By its nature it is a little repetitive. I suspect it's the sort of book students and business leaders will be expected to dip into on an ad-hoc basis for their MBA studies. It's also chock-full of anecdotes which demonstrate how quite serious failings are often erroneously reduced to "human failure". Some of those stories are rather distressing - featuring death, dismemberment, plane crashes, and the like - but they also feel a little like "just so" stories. They illustrate the points well, but felt to me a little voyeuristic. I'd go so far as to say it is probably one of the best management books that I've read: holding people accountable is fine; • but you need to be able to show that…