You have to laugh at the scammers and frauds in safety that play games seeking to reframe human error to a message Safety wants to hear.

It’s laughable, this silly game of denying human error and fallibility as if human error is just the result of a system. What an easy way to con an uncritical crowd to make some easy dollars.

On and on the rain will fall
Like tears from a star like tears from a star
On and on the rain will say
How fragile we are how fragile we are

These words by Sting (https://www.azlyrics.com/lyrics/sting/fragile.html) capture the reality of fallibility, frailty and fragility of what it means to be human. As sure as the rain will fall one day, so too will you be visited by fragility, human error and suffering. And, be assured, it is random, unpredictable and doesn’t conform to some theory concocted by an academic.

Moving human error away from humans to organisations/systems is just linguistic play, it make no difference to the daily reality of being mortal, fallible and frail.

The writer of the book of Matthew in the NT describes (5:45) how the sun rises on the good and evil just as the rain falls on the good and evil. Error, Fallibility and Fragility are not selective about who they visit.

When I was in Tallin (Estonia) I saw the ‘Dance of Death’ by Notke in St Nicholas church.

The painting reminds us that that humanity is frail and that any denial of it is nonsense (Becker – The Denial of Death – https://humanposthuman.wordpress.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/01/ernest_becker_the_denial_of_deathbookfi-org.pdf). Covid should have shaken the myth of the denial of death from us all.

So, what is all this linguistic game playing in safety with human error? How foolish all this re-framing of language wishing that fallibility and human error would go away and not be true (https://www.humandymensions.com/product/fallibility-risk-living-uncertainty/).

How fascinating this discourse on human error by so called experts with no framework of ethics, personhood or moral meaning with which they generate slogans to make Safety happy! Ah, the dollars! And the audience!

If you want to talk about human error, don’t start with some vague idea of what it is, start with a philosophy of human agency and an ethic of personhood (https://www.humandymensions.com/product/the-ethics-of-risk/) before you start playing linguistic games with it.

Interestingly, those playing linguistic games in safety with ‘human error’ and the psychology of blame seem to have little expertise in either linguistics or ethics in their Discourse. If you want to sell mis-information to the gullible, package it in a slogan. Wrap it up in language Safety loves to hear and suck in a huge safety audience keen to pay.

Alexander Pope was right:

… to err is human; to forgive divine

It might also help some if one knew a little of Poetics to the context of this phrase written in 1711 as part of a poetic treatise of 744 lines. Ah, but not Safety, just grab the one line you don’t like and wish it away.

Wishing human error away, or shifting it somewhere more convenient, through linguistic games, doesn’t make it so, regardless of who spruiks the spin, slogan or discourse. And when you wish it away or shift it somewhere else, it is still there, just in another context. That’s the con.

 Denying fallibility and frailty, or shifting human error, just takes you out of the real world into delusion. It certainly doesn’t help anyone develop Everyday Social Resilience (https://www.humandymensions.com/product/everyday-social-resilience-being-in-risk/) nor does it help people tackle Real Risk (https://www.humandymensions.com/product/real-risk/).

I’d rather listen to Sting, Pope or Matthew than some con artist selling mythology to a gullible audience wanting to wish away human error.

The best way to deal with human error is not its denial, or giving it shift, but rather tackling it as a reality and developing methods that enable Everyday Social Resilience to live with our frailty, fragility and fallibility.

This is what we do in SPoR. We develop practical positive methods to help people tackle the realities of risk and human error so that fragility, fallibility and frailty are accepted for what they are and how to live in everyday social resilience with them.