Basic Theory of Human Error
It has long been acknowledged that human performance is at times imperfect. Nearly two thousand years ago, the Roman philosopher Cicero cautioned “It is the nature of man to err”.
It is an unequivocal fact that whenever men and women are involved in an activity, human error will occur at some point.
In his book “Human Error”, Professor James Reason defines error as follows:
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“Error will be taken as a generic term to encompass all those occasions in which a planned sequence of mental or physical activities fails to
achieve its intended outcome, and when these failures cannot be attributed to the intervention of some chance agency”
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