Some estimates are that six out of ten injuries occur because of inattentiveness, often just a flash lasting less than a second.

Thousands of safety tools and other gear are ready for you to buy to help you keep your workplace free of injuries. Some of these items such as hard hats and hearing devices are required by law for certain types of work. Other tools measure, filter, absorb, shield, or in other ways protect the worker from hazardous risks.

As valuable as these tools are, they cannot begin to compare with the value of the human mind to prevent injuries in the workplace.

One moment of inattention, and half a dozen vehicles are piled up on the highway
A forgetful split second, and a bolt isn't secured. A distracting word or two, and a step on the safety checklist is missed.

The underlying purpose of every warning sign and safety notice at your business is to reduce human error. That 10 mph speed limit in the parking lot, for example, helps the driver avoid the mistake of driving too fast in a crowded area.

Signs such as "wet floor," "watch your head," or "hazardous materials: keep out" send similar warnings that hopefully prevent a blink of the brain from causing an unfortunate incident.

Exactly what is a blink of the brain? In the airline industry it is caled "pilot error." In other fields a lapse in judgment is called "operator error." Books and scholarly papers have been written about the phenomenon of human error that covers all of these. But what is human error?

Is it the act of making a mistake that causes a problem? Jim spilled oil on the sidewalk, and another worker slipped on it and fell,
injuring his elbow.

Or is it the act of making a mistake whether or not a problem occurs?
Jim spilled oil on the sidewalk, but nobody slipped on it, and eventually
it was absorbed into the concrete.

All businesses want to reduce human error.

When an injury or disruption of work occurs, business management sets forth on one of two approaches to learn how to prevent this type of error from occurring again.

The person approach

The first approach is to track the problem to its human source. "Who made this error?" "Who signed off on the safety sheet?" "Who was the last person in the control room?"
When the person has been identified, questions immediately follow: What is wrong with this person? How can this person be punished so this will not happen again? Do we need to offer the person another job in the business or let him go?

This approach is called the "person approach" because it blames wrong-activing individuals for bad outcomes.

The system approach

The second approach is more painful for the business manager but is more effective in finding a long-term solution. The questions are, "Why did our error-reduction system fail in this case?" "What could we have done to strengthen our error defense? What additional resources are needed to keep this aspect of the operation free from human error?"

When the failure of the system is identified, steps are taken to correct the situation to prevent such lapses in the future. The employee involved in the problem is invited to be part of the team searching for a way to make error prevention more effective.

This method is called the "system approach" because it focuses on 'upstream" activities that triggered the lapse rather than blaming the employee for the mishap.

Don't let a "blink of the brain" send a valuable employee to the hospital (or worse), but don't turn into an ogre to enforce absolute attention to all details all the time. Usually the problem is with the system, and that's where you can make a difference.