Not sure if I ever properly shared this – but this was my first conference paper released back in 2018.
It’s a HIGHLY condensed version of a much larger paper I wrote, and hope to publish one day.
It covers a range of topics around symbolic safety, false assurance, ‘fantasy planning’, and catastrophic accidents which seemingly took organisations by surprise (considerably via mismatches in their perceptual horizons and assumptions of safety).
We argue that:
· Artefacts, designed to help navigate uncertainty and provide structure and knowledge, come to be conflated with reality
· The process of documenting planning activities and assumptions can sometimes take priority over the actual management of those issues
· This is driven by various factors, e.g. cognitive heuristics and biases, social norms and customs, and organisational factors
· Ultimately, people see what they expect to see
· The use of risk assessments and other similar activities can “give the veneer of objectivity”
· Expert/SME knowledge, while critical, can also mask emerging risks due to esoteric language and beliefs, among other factors
· A need for certainty and uncomfortableness with uncertainty, where people fill in the gaps based more on plausibility over accuracy
· And other stuff I can’t be bothered writing.
Just skip the final section 4 about ‘next steps’; it’s aged and largely arbitrary.
My site with more reviews: https://safety177496371.wordpress.com
SafetyInsights.org 