A ‘call to vigilance’ is the same as saying ‘just try harder’. What a pointless suggestion….as if anyone would, as part of their normal day, would make a choice to positively put an aircraft (or two) into a situation where a collision might occur……
Another way to say this is if people don’t ‘try harder’ then we can now blame the individual person rather than look at whole system safety.
Professor Sidney Dekker, author of The Field Guide to Understanding Human Error (the best ‘simple to understand’ book on this subject which I have found) has some great short videos on this. Look them up on YouTube.
He gives a very cogent explanation of why the ‘just try harder’ message is an abrogation of management responsibility. It’s quicker, easier, cheaper and much less painful for the organisation to blame the poor person in the hot seat @ the time an incident.
As humans we are going to make mistakes. But nobody comes to work to do a bad job (excluding deliberate sabotage - which is a completely different discussion) so the trick is to ask the why - why the mistake happened - rather than the who….