ABSTRACT
This contribution offers a critical reflection on standard reactive incident reporting systems and provides an outlook towards proactive methods for monitoring risk. Incident reporting systems are often regarded as a prerequisite for effective Resilience Engineering, but sometimes they fail to achieve most of the expected benefits. There is now a growing body of research that criticises incident reporting on the basis of its inability to provide an accurate representation of harm compared to other methods, as well as the fact that there is still widespread under-reporting of incidents. In this chapter we take a different angle by arguing that the problems encountered with incident reporting are, at least to some extent, to be found in the structural characteristics of the respective domains rather than within either the principle of incident reporting as such or its implementation. We identify a number of such structural characteristics that are necessary for successful incident reporting through reflection on the success and (partial) failure of two major incident reporting systems from aviation and healthcare. Where those structural characteristics are not present, incident reporting systems are bound to encounter difficulties. In such environments, a complementary proactive risk monitoring approach may be required to maximise learning from operator and front-line feedback.
