Breakthrough Point

Study hard your policies
Follow all the rules

Master your machines, my friend
Sharpen all your tools

Polish up your teamwork skills
Then turn the light within

Take the final step to excellence
When the fight for you begins

Tony Kern, Copyright 2007

Thief and Murderer: Nothing Less

“The will to conquer is the first condition of victory.” - Ferdinand Foch

Human error is the thief of human happiness and the slayer of dreams, careers, potential, and all too frequently – life itself. Viewing it as anything less hostile is to willfully expose your throat to the knife.

The global cost of human error is almost incomprehensible, and very few will look at the numbers without agreeing that “someone” needs to do more to prevent it. But when viewed from a personal perspective, the danger appears remote. Like many thieves and murderers, error producing conditions live among us hidden, almost invisible. We ignore the threat because most error is of the petty thief type, annoying, occasionally resulting in minor loss of productivity, but certainly not life threatening. This perception holds until the very same conditions that we have cohabitated with safely for years, suddenly manifests itself in some major way, changing our lives and those around us in tragic ways forever.

Error is a persistent thief, who will continue to steal from you until you make a conscious decision to put an end to it. Additionally, errors that result in trivial outcomes of little consequence on one occasion can suddenly and without warning result in a life or career ending result on another. People are lulled into a false sense of security because the tragic outcome has not yet occurred. Let’s put human error Lesson #1 on the table right now:

Things that have never happened before happen all the time.[i]

In the blink of an eye, the same petty thief you have grown accustomed to as a minor annoyance on the street corner becomes your worst nightmare. In hindsight, it becomes all too clear – you could have and should have seen it coming. The signs were there, the hazard was present, but you could not and would not believe it could happen to you. Those that have been though this sing a common refrain – “I had no idea this simple problem could turn so ugly so fast. This had been going on for years without serious consequence.” These individuals have fallen victim to a phenomenon known as the Normalization of Deviance, a dangerous dumbing down of our risk perception, and a subject we will discuss in depth in a later posting.
The first purpose of this weblog is to raise the alarm, to point out how prevalent and destabilizing human error is in our daily lives, as well as how quickly small errors can lead to tragedy. Human error Lesson #2:

Anything less than a conscious commitment to understanding and reducing personal error is an unconscious commitment to accepting their continuing presence and all future consequences.

Please reread the previous paragraph. Unnecessary and avoidable human error is likely the most dangerous threat to your health, family, professional development and life that you face in your day to day life – at home, in your car, at work or at play. It manifests itself without warning, and changes lives forever.

[i] Attributed to Dr. Kathleen Sutcliffe, University of Michigan Ross School of Business, 2006