Webinar - Error Management Introduction

Sponsored by ASEM - IISE/SEMS - CAE- ABEPRO

Presenter
Jan Hagen

Error Management - Introduction

Dealing with errors – your own and those of others – is a challenge although we all make mistakes. We may recognize this and expect our staff to alert us on our own errors. However in practice this rarely happens. A view on high reliability organizations shows that they follow a concept that provides valuable lessons for other organizations. The webinar will be an introduction into the concept of error management and will set the background for the follow-up webinars looking into the specifics and experiences of different high reliability organizations.

Presenter Biography

Jan Hagen is an associate professor at ESMT Berlin. Jan’s research and teaching focus is on leadership. He is particularly interested to understand how teams and organizations deal with errors. Apart from journal articles he published the book Confronting Mistakes – Lessons from the Aviation Industry when Dealing with Error (Palgrave Macmillan) in 2013. His research received wide media coverage in outlets like the BBC, Financial Times, and The Economist.

This webinar is the first in a four-part series.

Webinar Series

What happens if someone makes a mistake or takes the wrong decision? The issue here is not intentional misconduct, fraudulent behaviour, gross negligence or large-scale mismanagement, but the little mistakes, errors and poor decisions that occur every single day. Mostly, errors are the result of momentary blackouts, a temporary short circuit in the brain, false impressions, deceptive memories, dots wrongly joined, fragments of conversation that we interpret incorrectly, prejudices, momentary feelings of mental imbalance, disorientation, stress and other disturbances.

What does this mean for larger organizations? From research we know that speaking-up when spotting errors is not the norm in organizations. Mistakes are still associated with shame and embarrassment. Yet factual error management can work and be successful as can be seen by studying high reliability organizations such as aviation, medicine, and the nuclear industry.

In the webinar series on error management we will look into the practices and learnings from these high reliability organizations. Apart from the specifics of the different industries we will reflect on what is necessary to establish an effective open error culture. This includes psychological safety to enable communication across hierarchical levels, a system of error reporting, a leadership culture, where people are empowered to speak up, and how humans interact in complex systems.

The speakers are either researchers or practitioners and provide insights into lessons learned from their field. The series will explore how these learnings may be applied in other organizations.

The webinar series is scheduled as follows. Please note that EACH webinar has its own URL for registration.

June 20 - Introduction to error management (Jan Hagen, ESMT Berlin) - 1:00 PM EDT
Register here: https://www.asem.org/event-2566166

July 11 - Error management and reporting culture in aviation (Thomas Wilpert, Air Berlin) - 1:00 PM EDT
Register here: https://www.asem.org/event-2568371

July 25 - Empowerment as tool for error management in medicine (Jan Brommundt, University Medical Center Groningen) - 1:00 PM EDT
Register here: https://www.asem.org/event-2568393

August 8 - Management practices of learning from errors in high risk industries (Nicolas Dechy, Institut de Radioprotection et de Sûreté Nucléaire) - 1:00 PM EDT
Register here: https://www.asem.org/event-2568621