Last changed 20 Mar 2000 ............... Length about 1,500 words (10,000 bytes).
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Discussion on error types

Led by Steve Draper, Department of Psychology, University of Glasgow.

Contents (click to jump to a section)

Summary announcement

[suitable for emailing out]
Steve Draper will lead a GIST session concerned with classifying errors especially in accidents. The seminar is to GIST at 4pm Thur 13th April 2000, room F121, Computing Science. More details at: http://www.psy.gla.ac.uk/~steve/talks/errframe.html

I will propose briefly what seems to me a new idea, then invite the audience to discuss it, particularly by offering cases that either fit or undermine the proposed idea(s). As many of the audience will know the field better than I do, this is crucial. In fact I have 2 such topics, but will only get to the second one, if there is little discussion of the first.

The first idea is to apply the 3 way classification of individual errors into slips, rule-based mistakes, and knowledge-level mistakes to 4 levels: the individual, the team or group, the organisation, and society. Management errors can perhaps be understood as appearing in several places in this 12-type scheme.

The seminar / discussion

I propose to lead a GIST session concerned with analysing errors especially in accidents. I will propose briefly what seems to me a new idea, then invite the audience to discuss it, particularly by offering cases that either fit or undermine the proposed idea(s). As many of the audience will know the field better than I do, this is crucial. In fact I have two such topics, but will only get to the second one, if there is little discussion of the first.

The talk is to GIST at 4pm Thur 13th April 2000, room F121, Computing Science.

A proposed framework for errors

The concept of error only makes sense as relative to some violated norm. Individual errors are thought of as contradictions within an individual's mind: they do something inconsistent with what, in some other sense, they know and want. Furthermore, in most though not all cases we not only have a mental mechanism to act correctly but extra mechanisms to check on this, so that an error indicates more than one failure at once i.e. of the checking as well as of the basic action production. Both of these features are strongly suggestive of how it might be interesting to analyse team error, and organisational error; where the separate parts or aspects of a person's mind might map on to separate individuals in a team or separate units in an organisation.

A 4-way classification of individual human error is now widely used:

My proposal is to apply (cross, multiply) this 4-way classification with 4 levels:

A link.

Notes:

Causation and accident analysis

This second topic is about expanding on the implications of these fundamental points:

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