Managing and predicting risk, safety and stability in a challenging world

It should be obvious that we must learn from our mistakes, so all of society, and ourselves, should have progressively safer, less risky systems and behaviors as we learn. Accidents are seemingly random in their occurrence, but in fact, this very apparent randomness is also containing information. The information we have researched and analysed covers nearly 200 years of knowledge from literally millions of multitudinous observations. The failure rate provides the expression for the probability of any outcomes, and the resulting curve is called the Human Bathtub. By quantifying the randomness, the uncertainty and the disorder, we have provided a new objective measure of “safety culture”, “organizational learning” and “engineering resilience”. We have linked individual learning and skill acquisition to the systematic risk reduction observed for entire systems with increasing experience. The results will be of interest to those interested and engaged in risk management, and in the social sciences where risk perception is important.