Practical drift, a term coined by Snook (2002), summarizes how goal conflicts, multiple dynamic interactions between systems, short- and long- term feedback loops, and standards for performance affect the consistent implementation of standard operating procedures
Dekker (2011) shortened the term to drift incorporating the dynamics of complexity science
Snook and Dekker have observed that the usual incident investigation process, which ends in a long list of corrective activities, rarely lowers serious injuries and fatalities
Dekker (2011) and Connor (2012) observe that drift is always easy to see in hindsight
However, hindsight does not predict future drift
In fact, studies have found that hindsight bias is the greatest obstacle to evaluating the performance of humans in complex systems after bad outcomes (Dekker, 2007; Hugh & Dekker, 2009; Woods & Cook, 1994)