Catálogo de publicaciones - libros

This chapter explores how the upbringing of children can affect the extent to which they are capable of and prepared to deal with risk, uncertainty, and fallibility in adulthood. More specifically, it discusses how children’s engagement in risky play can have anti-phobic effects that help to prepare them for encounters with real and probable adversity as adults, and also the critical quality moments where the next decision they make will crucially impact the outcome of processes at work. The aim of the chapter is to consider possible links from findings in childhood research to theories about people’s capabilities to cope with fallibility in work settings. It does so by applying the concept of resilience, and the distinctions between growth and fix mindset, and between agent and pawn mentality.

This chapter explores how learning from failure requires close attention to the distinction between causes of failure and blame for failure. It also identifies and discusses three psychological phenomena that pose a challenge to effective learning from failure. All of them have links to the communication climate for voicing a concern that the proposed course of action may not after all be the best one. First, -- is the tendency we have to follow through on an activity even when it is not meeting our expectations, because of the resources we have already invested in it. Second, research on indicates that the more people who are witness to an event that calls for help or some other form of intervention, the less likely it is that anybody will step forward and help or intervene. Third, people are vulnerable to , in that they have a tendency to notice information that is in line with their beliefs and assumptions, and to disregard information that gives them reason to reconsider.

This chapter discusses narratives from a nursing home where the residents express a wish to come closer to social life and be more active. Based on the residents’ answers to inquiries about what they considered to be a good life, the leaders at the home initiated a range of social activities. The intention was to provide the residents with more room for meaningful practices, but some of the activities also increased the risk of harm. Starting from the nursing home narratives, the chapter addresses three principled questions regarding responsibility and risk at work: (1) To what extent do our moral evaluations of past decisions and behavior depend on actual outcomes? (2) What kind of protection against sanctions should be in place for people who take risky decisions at work? (3) What is the role of leaders in cases where either active or passive mistakes from employees lead to bad outcomes? These questions are discussed in the light of the distinction between active and passive mistakes, and the distinction between prescriptive (do good) and proscriptive (do not harm) ethics.

This chapter focuses on the lessons learned in aviation about coping with fallibility. Safety in aviation has improved in recent decades because of a shared realization that pilots are fallible beings. There has been a shift in attitude, from seeing pilots as extraordinary, infallible individuals who could be trusted to bring the plane safely to its destination, to understanding air travel as depending on teamwork, where all the individuals involved depend on feedback and support from others. The development of Crew Resource Management (CRM) tools and training practices have strengthened the safety climate. The chapter builds on interviews with a pilot and a flight engineer. These are interpreted in light of theoretical contributions from social psychology.

This chapter discusses examples from healthcare, to illustrate further the relevance of Reason’s barrier model beyond aviation, and to introduce the concept of trust into the discussion about fallibility. Hospital staff face situations where it is important that they voice a concern, and intervene to stop chains of events that may lead to unnecessary injury or death. Hospitals and other organizations in the health sector need to create a barrier system where people do not hesitate to voice their concerns, a communication climate where it is normal and appreciated to intervene when you sense that something is wrong. The guiding ideas of this chapter are that openness about mistakes (i) can serve a foundation for trust within a professional unit, (ii) is necessary for further learning and improvement of professional services, and (iii) can strengthen public trust in the service providers.

This chapter addresses how initiatives to seek, offer, and provide help is a central ingredient in coping with fallibility at work. First, it discusses how bystander effects and confirmation fallacies can create hesitancy to seek and offer help. Second, it focuses on the perception of social cost as an explanation of why people might refrain from seeking help in critical situations at work. The starting point for that discussion is two examples from healthcare, one real and one fictitious, in which inexperienced professionals attempt to do things on their own, without help or support from colleagues. Third, it considers how systems of holding back can make people mute and passive in situations where they either need or are in a position to offer help.

An ethics of fallibility can have a normative and a descriptive dimension. The normative traditions of consequentialism and duty ethics provide conflicting advice about what is the morally right response to different kinds of mistakes. The chapter outlines some theoretical resources available to formulate a normative platform for coping with fallibility, both with regard to what from a moral point of view should happen ahead of critical events where people are likely to make mistakes, in the midst of such events, and in their aftermath. The descriptive dimension of an ethics of fallibility addresses alternative explanations to why people become involved in moral misbehavior, and often continue to be so once they have habituated a certain behavioral pattern. In the final section of the chapter, the normative and descriptive dimensions are combined in a stance on forgiveness. Considerations of whether a person who has made a moral mistake ought to be forgiven (a normative issue) can be informed by knowledge about why people make such mistakes (a descriptive issue).