ABSTRACT
Errors and violations are viewed, reasonably enough, as deviations from desired or appropriate behaviour. The managers attribute unreliability to unwanted variability. As with technical unreliability, they see the solution as one of ensuring greater consistency of human action and hence of the system performance as a whole. The essence of this is captured by Karl Weick’s insightful observation that ‘reliability is a dynamic non-event’. It is dynamic because processes remain within acceptable limits due to moment-to-moment adjustments and compensations by the human operators. Collective mindfulness allows an organisation to cope with unpleasant surprises in an optimal manner. Collectively mindful organisations work hard to extract the most value from what little incident and accident data they have. This chapter takes the notion of collective mindfulness forward by combining it with individual mindfulness and arguing that both are necessary for maintaining a state of intelligent wariness.
