An error trap is a condition or situation in the work environment that increases the likelihood of human error. These traps don't cause harm directly but set people up to fail by making mistakes more probable, often without them realizing it. Recognizing and managing error traps is key to building resilient systems that anticipate human fallibility.

Hazards are direct sources of potential harm. They are the energy that can cause injury, damage or loss and are inherently dangerous. Error Traps on the other hand, are conditions that increase the likelihood of human error. They don’t directly cause harm, but they set people up to make errors.

Error traps are often missed in traditional risk assessments because those assessments are typically hazard focused and not context-focused. Those “conditions for failure” are the contextual factors—the error traps—that only show up when you look closely at how work is actually done, not just how it was designed.

Some error traps can only be uncovered with non-traditional safety data because traditional safety metrics—like incident rates, audits, and compliance checks—tend to focus on outcomes and rule-following, not the conditions that make errors more likely. These conventional tools often miss the subtle, day-to-day realities of normal work where error traps actually live.