Books
Slips, Mistakes and Violations
A Life in Error: From Little Slips to Big Disasters
Reason, James. Farnham, Surrey, England, and Burlington, Vermont, U.S.: Ashgate, 2013. 149 pp. Figures, references, index.
A teapot and a cat set James Reason on the path to becoming a renowned expert on error in complex industries such as aviation.
As Reason tells the anecdote in his new book, one afternoon in the early 1970s, he was brewing tea and about to put the tea leaves in the pot when the cat — “a very noisy Burmese” that slightly intimidated him — showed up and howled insistently to be fed. Reason opened a tin of cat food and spooned some out … into the teapot.
“I little realized at the time that this bizarre slip would change my professional life,” Reason says. A lecturer in psychology at the University of Leicester, he was going through a dry spell in research topics.
“I started to reflect upon my embarrassing slip,” he says. “O…
