ABSTRACT
As Charles Lindblom has pointed out there is little disagreement with respect to the heuristic nature of either human rationality or organizational sensemaking. The source of disagreement arises with regards to the ‘ought’ or the norms for human rationality. Jens Rasmussen observes that with respect to this approach to explaining accidents, the human operators are in a very unfortunate position. J. Klayman and Y. W. Ha illustrate why it is essential to sample various contexts, before drawing the conclusion that humans are irrational or that they are poor decision makers. A fundamental design hypothesis is that if the values are clearly specified, then smart humans can generally be trusted to eventually adjust their behavior to achieve satisfactory performance relative to those values. With respect to improving observation, the design challenge is to provide the best information possible about the current and future states of the process.
