Every Ergonomist knows this struggle: getting buy-in from engineering, operations and senior management for proactive design, rather than being called in to fix things after an incident, injury or quality failure has already happened. It is a familiar pattern across manufacturing, engineering and production environments. The business case for prevention is harder to make than the business case for cure, even though prevention is nearly always cheaper, faster and less disruptive.
What James Reason Taught Us About Human Error
James Reason, the psychologist behind the Swiss Cheese Model of accident causation, gave our field the language for why that matters. In Human Error (1990), he argued that frontline workers are rarely the main instigators of an accident. As he put it, they "inherit system defects" and their part is "adding the final garnish to a lethal brew whose ingredients have already been long in the cooking."
That is a striking image, and a useful one. It reframes where responsibility actually sits. Long before an operator makes a slip, a lapse or a mistake, decisions have already been made about how a workstation is laid out, how a machine is installed, how a process is sequenced and how a job is designed. Those decisions set the conditions in which errors become possible, or in which they become almost inevitable.
Redefining What Ergonomics Actually Does
This is why proactive Ergonomics is so often misunderstood. It is not about making a job more comfortable or a system more user-friendly, useful as those outcomes are. Its real purpose is to identify, design out and engineer out the conditions that let an error or a poor design decision become an incident, an injury or a quality defect, long before anyone reaches the frontline.
In manufacturing and engineering environments particularly, this means looking upstream: at layout, at reach and posture requirements, at task sequencing, at the interface between operator and machine and at how a process will actually be worked, not just how it looks on a drawing. A design that is workable on paper can still create the exact conditions Reason described, if the person who will use it is not part of that design conversation from the outset.
The Earlier Ergonomics Is Involved, the Better
The timing matters as much as the intervention itself. The earlier Ergonomics is involved in a project, a process or a piece of equipment, the more of those latent conditions are designed out before they ever matter, and the less costly and disruptive the outcome. Retrofitting a workstation after it has been built, retraining a workforce around a flawed process or redesigning a line after a string of near misses all cost more, in time and in money, than getting the design right at the outset.
This is the thinking behind good design consultancy, with Ergonomics and Human Factors Engineering input at project stage, rather than Ergonomics being treated as a compliance check once a system is already in place.
Is Your Organisation Firefighting or Getting Ahead?
Every organisation sits somewhere on that spectrum between firefighting the consequences of poor Ergonomics and getting ahead of them. Reason's insight was that the frontline is usually the last link in a much longer chain, not the first. The earlier that chain is examined, the more options an organisation has, and the fewer surprises it is left to manage later.
If you are reviewing a new process, workstation or piece of equipment and want Ergonomics input at the design stage rather than after the fact, I would be glad to talk through what that could look like for your project.