SafetyInsights.org

It’s been a while since I shared this, but here’s a brief conference paper I published in `18, exploring fantasy planning and false assurance. (It’s a heavily trimmed version of a much larger paper I hope to one day publish in full.)

We explore several angles on the sources and problems of fantasy planning.

First we ask – how does something known not to be true get recorded as if it was real? As potential explanations:

·        A deliberate attempt to mislead.  Here we believe while malfeasance and misconduct are seductive explanations, it probably fails to explain the majority of instances in organisations, where good people, doing what they thought was the appropriate or satisfactory thing was for that context

·        An attempt to provide an acceptable answer to someone not willing to discuss or accept the real state of affairs. This element explores elements of power, subjective planning and false safety

Next we ask: how does something not known to be true become recorded as if it was real? In response we argue:

·        It was believed to be true. E.g. via a range of cognitive biases and heuristics, organizational and social factors shaping the perception of an ‘objective world’, people seeing what they want to see, and risk and safety methods providing a “veneer of objectivity and truth”

·        Expert practices reveals and conceals risks. E.g. esoteric vocabulary and beliefs inherent in highly sophisticated, uncertain and specialised fields can obscure the sensitization to major failure

·        Risk analyses may not accurately represent the operational danger

·        It was expected to be become true, but didn’t. This reflects the gap between WAD and WAI

We then explore some unintended consequences of fantasy planning, and potential ways to reveal symbolic safety. I wouldn’t read into the final section too much (the next steps/revealing the gap), this was made purely for the conference and doesn’t exist in the full paper.

Ref: Hutchinson, B., Dekker, S., & Rae, A. (2018, May). Fantasy planning: the gap between systems of safety and safety of systems. In Australian System Safety Conference.

Study link: https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Ben-Hutchinson-4/publication/325395758_Fantasy_planning_the_gap_between_systems_of_safety_and_safety_of_systems/links/5b0b4cfc4585157f871ad571/Fantasy-planning-the-gap-between-systems-of-safety-and-safety-of-systems.pdf

LinkedIn post: https://www.linkedin.com/posts/benhutchinson2_its-been-a-while-since-i-shared-this-but-activity-7170208242155859968-shiB?utm_source=share&utm_medium=member_desktop