Кездейсоқ қателіктер мен олардың салдары

Action with unintended consequences

Human error is an action that has been done but that was "not intended by the actor; not desired by a set of rules or an external observer; or that led the task or system outside its acceptable limits". Human error has been cited as a primary cause contributing factor in disasters and accidents in industries as diverse as nuclear power (e. g., the Three Mile Island accident), aviation, space exploration (e. g., the Space Shuttle Challenger disaster and Space Shuttle Columbia disaster), and medicine. Prevention of human error is generally seen as a major contributor to reliability and safety of (complex) systems. Human error is one of the many contributing causes of risk events.

Human error refers to something having been done that was "not intended by the actor; not desired by a set of rules or an external observer; or that led the task or system outside its acceptable limits". However, a mere failure is not an error if there had been no plan to accomplish something in particular. therefore actions later termed "human error" are actually part of the ordinary spectrum of human behaviour. The study of absent mindedness in everyday life provides ample documentation and categorization of such aspects of behavior. While human error is firmly entrenched in the classical approaches to accident investigation and risk assessment, it has no role in newer approaches such as resilience engineering.

Some researchers have argued that the dichotomy of human actions as "correct" or "incorrect" is a harmful oversimplification of a complex phenomenon. A focus on the variability of human performance and how human operators (and organizations) can manage that variability may be a more fruitful approach. Newer approaches, such as resilience engineering mentioned above, highlight the positive roles that humans can play in complex systems. In resilience engineering, successes (things that go right) and failures (things that go wrong) are seen as having the same basis, namely human performance variability. A specific account of that is the efficiency–thoroughness trade off principle, which can be found on all levels of human activity, in individual as well as collective.