Human Factors: The Possible Future by Sidney Dekker

As I mentioned in yesterday’s post, Sidney W. A. Dekker has identified some “hard” truths that human factors and ergonomics practitioners need to face as the discipline moves into the future.  Specifically, in his book “Ten Questions about Human Error: A New View of Human Factors and Human Error,” he states:  

Technological change gave rise to human factors and system safety thinking. The practical demands posed by technological changes endowed human factors and system safety with the pragmatic spirit they have to this day. But pragmatic is no longer pragmatic if it does not match the demands created by what is happening around us now. The pace of sociotechnological change is not likely to slow down any time soon. If we think that World War II generated a lot of interesting changes, giving birth to human factors as a discipline, then we may be living in even more exciting times today. If we in human factors and system safety keep doing what we have been doing, simply because it worked for us in the past, we may become one of those systems that drift into failure. Pragmatics requires that we too adapt to better cope with the complexity of the world facing us now. Our past successes are no guarantee of continued future achievement. (p. xv)