Where does ‘failure’ come from? Why do some things not go as we planned? When bad things happen, at that time, it can be chaotic and appear very complex. Often, in hindsight (when the urgency has faded), we find that good people made bad decisions at that time. Most of the time such failures were not complicated and we find that most likely, anyone else put in the same position, would have made the same decision. So why do things not always go as planned?

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Trick question, it’s neither!

When we hear people use the term ‘error’ it is normally associated with being the cause of some type of bad outcome. We hear it all the time with airline accidents where they conclude ‘pilot error’.

‘Error’ is neither the cause nor the undesirable outcome! Let’s see why.

Is the only type of error a ‘human error’? I struggled to think of an ‘error’ that is not a human error, so I asked if others could think of something else. I would like to thank Dr. Peter Elias who commented that errors can occur in biologic processes, such as RNA and DNA replication or messaging. He also cited non-human animals make errors all the time as well.

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