Precis: Resilience Engineering is obviously the intellectual progenitor of incremental safety. This essay recounts how resilience engineering came about, and also tries to explain why resilience engineering did fulfill the expectations by which it was met, specifically to become the long awaited replacement of the Safety Legacy (SL). RE was the reason for proposing Safety-I and Safety-II, and since Safety-II now is morphing into incremental safety, RE is clearly also part of the foundation for incremental safety.
Presis: Decremental safety and incremental safety do not define two different types of safety, but two different ways or approaches to become safer and to achieve a state of safety. There can in fact be only one definition of safety, namely as the state where there are as few unexpected and unacceptable outcomes as possible. One of the problems of safety is how it is defined. Jim Reason nailed the definition problem, when he introduced the four paradoxes of safety (Reason, 2000). Understanding these paradoxes is important for any kind of safety-related activity, and is practically a precondition for incremental safety
Precis: While the human factor initially was about the shortcomings of human performance relative to the perfection of machines (epitomised by the Fitts’ List) it soon became associated with one specific feature, namely the unpredictability and unreliability, that turned into the concern for human error, in the sense that variable and unreliable performance of humans quickly became the favourite candidate for causes of UUOs. This essay will present a broader view of human factors. The particular human error view is the topic of the following fourth essay.
Humans as presumably sentient beings feel anxious whenever something unexpected happens, particularly if it also brings unacceptable outcomes. One thousand years ago the Muslim scholar Ibn Hazm (994-1064) wrote that “The chief motive of all human actions is the desire to avoid anxiety.” In the 19th century the great German philosopher (Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900) elaborated “To trace something unfamiliar back to something familiar is at once a relief, a comfort and a satisfaction, while it also produces a feeling of power. The unfamiliar involves danger, anxiety and care -the fundamental instinct is to get rid of these painful circumstances. First principle - any explanation is better than none at all.” In their attempts to find a socially acceptable cause people usually ,and involuntarily, make an efficiency-thoroughness trade-off and settle for the cause that represents the default explanation in the current age of safety, cf. Table 1. This is why the preferred cause in the second age of safety became human error. It was first of all convenient, it was also immediately understood and accepted by others. And it finally corroborated with the experience everyone have that they sometimes act in a way that leads to UUOs.
Essay 7: The role and purpose of investigations, the model versus method dilemma.
Essay 8: The modelling dilemma:
Essay-11: How to establish and maintain an ISC. The Four Systemic Potentials