Frequent readers of my blog would probably realise that I’m a little sceptical of safety cases, as Scrooge remarked to Morely’s ghost, “There’s more of gravy than of grave about you, whatever you are!” So to for safety cases, oft more gravy than gravitas about them in my opinion, regardless of what their proponents might think.
Qui enim teneat causas rerum futurarum, idem necesse est omnia teneat quae futura sint. Quod cum nem…
[Roughly, He who knows the causes will understand the future, except no-one but god possesses such faculty]
There’s been much debate over the years as whether various tolerance of risk approaches actually satisfy the legal principle of reasonable practicability. But there hasn’t to my mind been much consideration of the value of simply adopting the legalistic approach in situations when we have a high degree of uncertainty regarding the likelihood of adverse events. In such circumstances basing our decisions upon what can turn out to be very unreliable estimates of risk can have extremely unfortunate consequences. Continue Reading…
Enshrined in Australia’s current workplace health and safety legislation is the principle of ‘So Far As Is Reasonably Practicable’. In essence SFAIRP requires you to eliminate or to reduce risk to a negligible level as is (surprise) reasonably practicable. While there’s been a lot of commentary on the increased requirements for diligence (read industry moaning and groaning) there’s been little or no consideration of what is the ‘theory of risk’ that backs this legislative principle and how it shapes the current legislation, let alone whether for good or ill. So I thought I’d take a stab at it. 🙂 Continue Reading…
In a series of occasional posts on this blog, I’ve discussed some of the pitfalls of heuristics based decision making as well as the risks associated with decision making on incomplete information or in an environment of time pressure. As an aid to the reader I’ve provided a consolidated list here.
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This railway crossing near miss due to a driver ‘racing the devil’ is, on the face of it, a classic example of the perversity of human behaviour. But on closer examination it does illustrate the risk we introduce when transitioning from a regine of approved operational procedures to those that have been merely accepted or tolerated.
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With a Bachelor’s in Mechanical Engineering and a Master’s in Systems Engineering, Matthew Squair is a principal consultant with Jacobs Australia. His professional practice is the assurance of safety, software and cyber-security, and he writes, teaches and consults on these subjects. He can be contacted at mattsquair@gmail.com
