O'reilly Security Podcast - O'reilly Media Podcast

The O’Reilly Security Podcast: Human error is not a root cause, studying success along with failure, and how humans make systems more resilient.In this episode, I talk with Steven Shorrock, a human factors and safety science specialist. We discuss the dangers of blaming human error, studying success along with failure, and how humans are critical to making our systems resilient.Here are some highlights: Humans are part of complex sociotechnical systems For several decades now, human error has been blamed as the primary cause of somewhere between 70% to 90% of aircraft accidents. But those statistics don’t really explain anything at all, and they don’t even make sense because all systems are composed of a number of different components. Some of those components are human—people in various positions and roles. Other components are technical—airplanes and computer systems, and so on. Some are procedural, or are soft aspects like the organizational structure. We can never, in a complex sociotech