The Field Guide to Understanding Human Error, 2nd Edition

12 Build a Timeline

Time is a powerful organizing principle, especially if you want to understand human activities in an event-driven domain. Event-driven means that the pace of activities is not (entirely) under control of the humans who operate the process. Things are happening in the process itself, or to it, that determine the tempo of for example people’s situation assessment and decision making.

In event-driven domains, people’s work ebbs and flows in sync with the processes they manage.The amount of work, the demands it poses, the pressures it puts on people—all of this varies over time. The kinds of work that people engage in (e.g. troubleshooting, assessing, deciding, rechecking) also vary over time, in concert with demands posed ...