James Reason

James Tootle Reason was a professor of psychology at the University of Manchester, from where he graduated in 1962 and where he was a tenured professor from 1977 until 2001. He wrote books on human error, including such aspects as absent-mindedness, aviation human factors, maintenance errors, and risk management for organizational accidents. In 2003, he was awarded an honorary DSc by the University of Aberdeen. He was a Fellow of the British Academy, the British Psychological Society, the Royal Aeronautical Society, and the Royal College of General Practitioners. He received a CBE in 2003 for his services in the reduction of the risks in health care. In 2011 he was elected an honorary fellow of the Safety and Reliability Society. Among his many contributions is the introduction of the Swiss cheese model, a conceptual framework for the description of accidents based on the notion that accidents will happen only if multiple barriers fail, thus creating a path from an initiating cause all the way to the ultimate, unwanted consequences, such as harm to people, assets, the environment, etc. Reason also described the first fully developed theory of a just culture in his 1997 book, Managing the Risks of Organizational Accidents.