ABSTRACT
As we saw in Chapter 1, one of the key aspects of technical rationality (TR) is that any object or system can be broken down into small component parts, which can then be mathematically modeled in terms of their causal relationships to one another. For a small class of events, TR works fine. The problem is that for extremely complex systems (and in safety, we are almost always faced with such systems) we may get a false simplicity; in other words, our little models with the little boxes and the little arrows may be so straightforward as to be somewhat crude and therefore misleading. To say otherwise is to “mistake the map for the territory.” Luckily, there is another approach that looks at systems as a whole and studies the component parts of systems insofar as they contribute to the whole: systems theory.
