Organisational Safety Catches

As Harold Thimbleby pointed out in his AISB 2010 talk, sensible design includes adding the equivalent of safety catches, so that crucial mistakes are not made.  (Interactive systems need safety locks, Harold Thimbleby, In press. 32nd International Conference on Information Technology Interfaces 2010. http://iti.srce.hr)

Surely we should try and do the same with organisations, including low-cost adaptions that can stop them making catastrophic mistakes.  These could include:

• Making sure mistakes are fed back and not discouraged by punishment
• Ensuring that people working together have talked socially

However we will only get a full understanding of these when we can model the organisation as a whole.