Errors are unintentional deviations from goals, rules, and standards. Error Management (EM) starts after an error has occurred; it attempts to block negative error consequences, to reduce their negative impact, or to deal quickly with error consequences once they occur. It further involves “controlling damage quickly (including reducing the chances of error cascades), and reducing the occurrence of particular errors in the future (secondary error prevention), as well as optimizing the positive consequences of errors, such as long-term learning, performance, and innovations.” (p. 10).
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Error Prevention vs. Error Management
Errors are traditionally regarded as negative events that should be avoided. However, a pure error prevention approach cannot deal adequately with the fact that errors are ubiquitous. The EM approach assumes that human errors per se can never be completely prevented, and, therefore, it is necessary to ask the question of what can be done after an error has occurred.
EM distinguishes between errors and their consequences. Whereas error prevention aims at avoiding negative error consequences by avoiding the error altogether, error management focuses on reducing negative error consequences and on increasing potentially positive consequences through design or training. Examples of using an error management approach can be found in software systems (e.g., the Undo function), physical setups (e.g., the containment structure around nuclear power plants), crew and individual behaviors (e.g., cross-checking in the cockpit that leads to “error trapping” i.e., catching the error before its negative consequences can unfold; see, and organizational practices.
Error Management Culture in Organizations
The facets of error management culture are open communication about errors, sharing error knowledge, helping in error situations as well as quick error detection and analysis, effective error recovery, and coordinated error handling efforts. These facets are all directly aimed at avoiding and reducing negative error consequences and at developing better strategies for handling errors in the future. A high organizational error management culture helps to reduce negative and to promote positive error consequences; studies show that error management culture in organizations is positively related to its profitability, performance and to innovation.
The concept of Error Management Training
There are two characteristics that distinguish error management training from training methods that seek to avoid errors during training: (1) active exploration with minimal guidance and (2) explicit encouragement to make errors during training along with positive error framing in error management instructions (note that some authors refer to this type of training as ‘error training’, e.g.,; other authors have used terms such as ‘error-filled training’, or enactive exploration ). Error management instructions are brief statements designed to reduce potential frustration of participants by emphasizing the positive function of errors during training (e.g., "Errors are a natural part of learning", "I have made an error, great, because now I can learn something new").
Learning from errors is enhanced by metacognition (self-reflectively thinking about the situation and strategies used) and by reducing the negative emotions due to making errors. The benefits of error management training are expected to unfold on post-training tasks, when errors are no longer encouraged and trainees are aware that their performance in now being evaluated. It is therefore important to conceptually and operationally distinguish training performance from post-training performance when conducting studies to evaluate training effectiveness.
Across studies, error management training led to better post-training far-transfer performance than alternative training methods, whereas for near-transfer performance, error management training and alternative training methods fared equally well. EM Training has also been shown to be better than simply providing exploratory training. Some studies suggest interactions of training method or error framing with personality characteristic (e.g.,).
The EM training has been used in a wide variety of tasks and professions, such as driving, firefighting, in pharmacists, and in surgeons.