How Safe Is Safe Enough?

Safety is a public good because the “consumption” or enjoyment of safety by one individual does not diminish the “availability” of safety for other individuals (assuming that the value of each human life is equal to the value of any other human life).  Government is elected by citizens of the society and is given official authority to enforce rules and regulations. Thus the government is given official power through enforcement of laws and regulations to maintain safety for the benefit of all citizens within its jurisdiction.  Magnitude of an accident (and its consequences) may affect each and every individual in the society or a random group of individuals. Theoretically, it is in general interest of all citizens to oblige with the rules and maintain safety.  In reality, “the picture” has many conflicting nuances.

As individuals we react to immediate pain.  Pain simplifies our point of view and helps us to survive (Minsky, 1985). Pain is build-in alarm system that informs human brain about immediate threats to its body’s existence.  As humans we tend to react to most immediate threats. When threats (and/or health hazards) are remote in terms of time and impact – such as smoking, breathing poisonous air, eating trans-fat food, etc – our reaction is not as swift or as rational.

A societal equivalent of human pain is loss of human life.  As a community or a society, people tend to react to accidents that involve loss of human lives with great attention.  The risks that are not visible or well understood do not get public attention until fatal accident actually takes place. As individuals, human society in general does not have high attention to threats and problems that are far in time and space.

Nothing can be valued more than human life. However, there is a distinction between the value of an exiting human life and the value of a deceased human being.  The later case was a substitute for blood feud or what is called vendetta, where attaching price to diseased life was the way to avoid further bloodshed. In fact this approach has been considered as more civilized conflict resolution for centuries (what is know as blood money). The moral line is drawn between the world of alive and the world of deceased. Those who attempt to take “the price tag” from the world of deceased and use it in our world make rational analysis, which is immoral at the same time.

In my point of view, there are two important trends worth noticing:

(1) As human society become more dependent on complex systems, there seems to be slow convergence of system safety and public health. It is clear that the fundamental of two fields is the same – the value of human life. However, it is not clear whether such oversimplified approach can be beneficial to either system safety or public health. This is just an intuitive feeling which I hope to understand during the course.

(2) Availability of information and its widespread and fast dissemination leads to greater public awareness. Easily available instruments and tools (email, matlab, google earth, skype, youtube, simple chemical tests and pH strips, individual radioactivity sensors, etc) lead to increased role of individuals in dealing with safety, which in turn influence behavior of governments and corporations. Availability of information also builds much richer postmortem picture of an accident and different accident scenarios, where ordinary citizens are able to question and challenge official reports and causes of an accident.

The simplest answer to the question “who should be responsibility for risk management?” is government and its regulatory agencies.  However, we know that the government agencies are managed and run by individuals. These individuals, as many of us, can manage only a certain level of complexity. There is no guarantee that they can integrate all the pieces together and maintain public safety all the time.

I think (“which implies that I do not as yet know so”), since safety is a public good, it has to be collective responsibility of each and every citizen in the society to think in cohesive and responsible when it comes to safety.

The role of the legal system depends on the end–result that society expects from its courts.  There must be a reason why the US legal system adopted the civil (tort) approach towards safety hazards (besides obvious corporate interests). It is my understanding that such approach was in part chosen to shift attention from responsibility of individuals to corporate responsibility, and eventually to accidents/hazards causes. It is difficult to judge if the system is functioning effectively or not since we have no information how many accidents/hazards were prevented just by potential possibility and danger of civil litigation.  We can only see the cases that are floating on the surface, in which corporations are using complex legal procedures to avoid, mitigate or postpone expensive settlements.

Criminal charges, on the other hand shift the focus from the accident to particular individual responsibility. It is often the case where both the government (which could be under public pressure) and the public itself are eager to “teach a lesson”. The expectation is shifted from understanding wholesale list of accident’s causes to finding specific “target” or “villain”.  Other potential “targets” are giving limited information about the accident reinforcing the initial bias, redirecting the blame and sacrificing the least protected “target.”

In the case of tainted milk, the Chinese government decided to teach a lesson. Three individuals were sentenced to death and 21 others, “mostly dairy producers and middlemen, were given terms ranging from two years to life in prison” (http://www.nytimes.com/2009/01/22/world/asia/22iht-milk.3.19601372.html).  Such lesson is likely to influence behavior of Chinese businessmen and even prevent potential food poisoning. One can argue that the trial may bring limited benefits to the society, even if it does not address the structural problem of food safety.

Here I would like to address the issue of Human error and Learning from Mistakes described (Flatch et al.). I think that we need to decouple <understanding the accident> from <learning from the accident>. I argue that it could be possible to learn from an accident even if complete description of an accident is not determined and vice versa. In any of the four options, the end result of the accident is the same.

	Learning form an accident	Failing to learn from an accident
Understanding the accident	X	X
Failing to understand the accident	X	X

So in the case of tainted milk, even if full picture of the food safety hazard has not been found or at least publicly recognized (i.e. export of the poisoned food products), there is still a possibility that appropriate lessons are learned. In the case of uncontrolled acceleration (Audi, Toyota, GM), even if the cause(s) of the fault(s) was known, the management has not learned the lesson.

This takes us back to individual reaction to physical pain.  Perhaps criminal prosecution of individual executives (in this case imprisonment) could be more effective approach in achieving public safety at the cost of objective accident investigation.

The biggest doubt here is that by focusing on individual responsibility we do not solve the challenges of potential accidents, which could be greater in power and magnitude as our society becomes more complex and interdependent.

On the relation between technology and decentralization

Recent technological developments and low cost of communication do play limited role in increased de-centralization of organizations and processes. However, I think there is an important factor that has been influencing organizational design long before rapid advancements in technology.

The environment in which human organizations have to operate dictate the design of the organization. If we assume that the organization managed by humans takes rational action, then we can expect the organization to adapt to the environment within which it had to survive, exist, operate, create value and benefits. One may argue that a clear distinction had to be made between natural and business environments, where the latter can be easier to influence and change. I do not discount a possibility of dynamic interaction between the organization and its outside environment.  Nevertheless, if we assume that there are many different companies operating within specific business environment, it is more likely for the business environment to change the shape of the organization than the opposite.

In theory, the very same organization can operate as centralized organization in one environment and de-centralized under different “environmental” conditions. In reality,  organizational culture, business model, structure, procedures and practices do not allow such dynamic to take place rapidly.  However, my key point is that technological development and low cost of communication do not solve this problem either.  Cheap and low cost communication can actually enforce centralization process and prevent much needed evolution (i.e. General Motors operations in Europe). In the same way, availability of new communication tools may not necessarily push meshed organizations to higher level of coordination, which could be beneficial, sustainable and competitive decision in the long term (i.e. Air-traffic control system in the US, independent sustainable energy generators in China or crab fishing in the Pacific).

Decentralization may also not necessarily bring freedom to a particular individual. Human societies are much more complex than we actually perceive. Such complexity is embedded by blood, physiological, religious, regional, ethnic, cultural, hierarchical, professional, and many other relations and interconnections, which often create multilayer structure of the particular society (what some call “the fabric”). Greater in size, cheaper, faster and interactive communication may change some of the interconnections, but not necessarily all of them. As in organization, such interconnection can actually strengthen old forms of interconnection (religious broadcasting, ethnic global-reach media, etc).

Moreover, better communication does make an individual more aware (or misinformed), but not necessarily lead to more independent decision or action. As the result, it does not directly make the individual more or less free.

Of course we need to define common understanding the meaning of freedom. Let us simply limit the understanding of freedom as “as freedom of choice and decision in an open market.”  But even in this limited context, there are number of barriers that new means of communications are not yet able to solve (difference in trade regimes, currency exchanges, environmental and labor regulations, etc).  As for an ideal global citizen, his/her consumer choices are even more standardized within a list of corporate products (Procter and Gamble, Gillette, Nestle, Coca Cola, McDonalds, etc), whereas individual entrepreneurship opportunities are narrowed down to marginal and meaningless service providing.

In sum, technology and innovation brings illusion of freedom and decentralization on both on global and national scales. Such illusion definitely helps to manipulate and control most informed and active groups of consumers by restraining them in a virtual sand box.  As in American Idolä, the public is just given an illusion of contributing to the decision-making, which in reality has already been made by the producers and “the corporate”.  At the end of the day the food has to be harvested and served, the electricity and nuclear plans have to be run, the planes and air traffic have to operate safely, cargo ships from China have to be navigated to ports and uploaded to Wal-mart trucks.

Principle 39

"Time and space are modes by which we think and not conditions in which we live" (Albert Einstein).

Principle 38

"To think means in any case, to bridge the gap in experience, to bind together facts and deeds otherwise isolated" (John Dewey).

Principle 37

"A fact poorly observed is more treacherous than faulty reasoning" (Paul Valery).

Principle 36

"The only relevant learning in a company is the learning done by those people who have the power to act"  (Arie P.De Geus).

Principle 35

"The cause is the sum total of the conditions, positive and negative, taken together, the whole of the contingencies of every description, which being realized, the consequence invariably follows"  (John Stuart Mill).