Human reliability and human factors in complex organizations: epistemological and critical analysis—Practical avenues to action

This paper starts from the realization that persistent problems remain in probabilistic safety assessments due to the difficulty to take into account collective and socal behavior in complex sociotechnical systems. An epistemological analysis of the foundations of human reliability analysis (HRA) leads to possible improvement issues of HRA, particularly to allow for the psychological aspects of human factors. Three sources of progress are briefly analyzed: quantitative assessment of the psychological climate inside a company; non-linear predictive model of the accident rate; analysis of the personnel's stress on off-shore platforms, using clinical inquiries, then an epidemiologic-type study. The paper concludes about the need for analysis of ‘positive’ human factors, not only focussed on human errors.