ABSTRACT

The development of thinking about safety can be described in terms of the development in the thinking about causes and of the development in the thinking about 'mechanisms'. The change in the nature of causes in a sense reflects the changes in what the constituents of systems of work are, what they are made of, and the reliability of the various constituents. Through the ages, the starting point for safety concerns has been the occurrence, potential or actual, of some kind of adverse outcome, whether it has been categorised as a risk, a hazard, a near miss, an incident, or an accident. In the civilian domain, the fields of communication and transportation were the first to witness the rapid growth in scope and performance as equipment manufacturers adapted advances in electronics and control systems. The development of technical risk analysis also led to a gradual intellectual separation between reactive safety (accident investigation) and proactive safety (risk assessment).