Humanware, human error, and hiyari-hat: A template of unsafe symptoms

For many years, the Japanese construction industry has practiced several accident-prevention activities. In spite of these safety activities, occupational accidents recur. Why? This paper offers examples of accident-prevention activities and it reports on a safety survey of construction workers in a Japanese construction company. These examples shows that “humanware” failure accounts for a much greater portion of the underlying causes of occupational accidents. “Humanware” is defined as a function of leadership, followership, and the reciprocal interaction between the two. The safety survey had 7,955 responses; 2,588 responses reported experiencing hiyari-hat (near-mass accidents). These respondents also reported on the nature and apparent causes of their hiyari-hats. In this paper, we found most accidents occur because of humanware failure. The underlying causes of hiyari-hat often include humanware failure and most frequently end with human error of individual workers. This paper presents a template that summarizes unsafe symptoms among humanware failure, human error, and hiyari-hats.