Preventing errors is a critical part of leadership and management. This is true regardless of your industry.

Key points for error prevention:

1. Positive attitude to errors:
2. Blame free culture
3. The psychology of human error
4. Look for an error chain, there are usually multiple factors leading to errors
5. Active failures (human, usually ~10-20%) vs latent failures (system, 80-90%)
6. Education and knowledge management (educate, don’t train)
7. Effective system safeguards
8. A focus on error detection and prevention (“Preventive and Corrective Action” model)
9. Simplification, be anal about it.
10. Error proofing and user centered design

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uO5tjMhWWWc

Also, when doing analysis, it’s important to keep in mind the traps that can be fallen into when trying to understand the error chain: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TqaFT-0cY7U

1. Counterfactual reasoning: talking about things that did not occur, the use of “would likely” and similar language
2. Normative language: using language that implies that the people chose to do the wrong thing.
3. Mechanistic reasoning: looking for a malfunctioning component in a system, rather than looking at the system overall.
4. Cherry picking data: picking only data which agrees with an assumed conclusion.