This lucid book presents a set of common principles to further our knowledge of the causes of major accidents in a wide variety of high-technology systems. Its unique combination of principles and practicalities make this seminal book essential reading for all those whose daily business is to manage, audit and regulate hazardous technologies of all kinds.

This succinct but absorbing book covers the main way stations on James Reason's 40-year journey in pursuit of the nature and varieties of human error. In it he presents an engrossing and very personal perspective, offering the reader exceptional insights, wisdom and wit as only James Reason can. The journey begins with a bizarre absent-minded action slip committed by Professor Reason in the early 1970s - putting cat food into the teapot - and continues up to the present day, conveying his uni...