ABSTRACT
This chapter describes the preliminaries of the method, most importantly the fact that the Functional Resonance Analysis Method (FRAM) looks into the reasons why things go - or might go - wrong, by first describing how things go - or should go -right. Since the FRAM has been developed as a bidirectional method, some comments are also made about the practical differences between accident investigation and risk assessment. Accident investigation is usually about finding why something went wrong. This is based on the tradition of fault finding in technological systems, which has evolved since the Industrial Revolution began in the eighteenth century. The problem for socio-technical systems is actually not so much whether a specific function will work or fail as it is how several functions may become coupled. Risk assessment using the FRAM changes from being a relatively simple calculation of aggregated failure probabilities, to become a discrete simulation of instantiations of the model.
