Originally posted on March 23, 2015 @ 8:05 PM

Risk and Safety in The Clockwork Universe

One of the many dilemmas for the risk and safety person is tackling the randomness and uncertainty of life. How can one propose a goal that requires perfect control in a universe that doesn’t operate like clockwork?

The idea of the clockwork universe was popular in the 19^th Century of Paley, Newton and the Deists. The attribution of order to all things suited the belief in a divine being, pulling the strings of the Universe in a deterministic way. In this era, there was no chance, only god’s will. Prayer was simply the supplication for the clockmaker to intervene in the mechanistic world. In such a framework the saying ‘everything happens for a reason’ made sense.

Hand (2014) in ‘The Improbability Principle, Why Coincidences, Miracles, and rare Events Happen Every Day’ tells us that all systems are intrinsically unstable and that nothing can be measured with perfect accuracy. Hand is Emeritus Professor of Mathematics at the Imperial college of London and President of The Royal Statistical Society. Hand talks about the macroscopic effect of small deviations in systems. What often starts out as a small difference is amplified over time and complexity. He compares this to the instability of the path of a cue ball rebounding from cushions and balls on a billiard table. Differences in angle amplify on each collision till eventually the difference is so large nothing can be predicted.

Much later after the Deists Lorenz developed what is now known as the ‘Butterfly Effect’ , the fundamental idea in chaos theory. The Butterfly Effect discusses how one small variable in a system can have a profound effect in another system. So, the flapping of a butterfly’s wings in Brazil can be connected to a cyclone in Australia.

Hand demonstrates that the world is situated in an essential context of randomness and chance. He discusses why randomness and chance are essential for life in the Universe to function as it is. He shows how randomness and chance are enmeshed into the very nature of the Universe and also the human system. He shows that the deterministic clockwork view is both constructed and evidence of fundamental attribution error. He demonstrates how the uncertainty principle operates at random in our world and does he demonstrates this mathematically. Rather than using the language of Deist certainty he suggests that we should only speak in the language of probability.

The quest for certainty ‘like clockwork’ is the quest for security and we see this in attribution in numerology and pattern interpretation. Humans who love control find patterns in circumstance and conspiracy in chance. One can have hours of fun trawling through the Bible, Nostradamus or Shakespeare finding sequences of meaning in patterns and numbers. Such a search says much more about the attribution of meaning to circumstance and randomness than any real meaning in the text. Standing in contrast to the quest for certainty, control and determinism is The Improbability Principle.

In 1986 I lent a book on Transactional Analysis to a friend, it was a rare book and one I didn’t want to lose. I had been chasing around to find this book for some time and so was reluctant to lend it to my friend and so, expected him to respect it and return it. Three months after lending the book I contacted my friend to retrieve the book and discovered he had lent it to someone else, and so he was going to chase it up. It turns out that my book was then passed on someone else and so on – I had lost my book. Inside the cover was my name, address and phone number, but no one had returned it. Since 1986 as was my habit, I would search old bookshops and second hand book stores for this book as well as others on my list. In 1993 I was trawling through a second bookshop in Adelaide and saw the TA book I had lost, what a find. Here I was making a casual walk into a shop, browsing because I had to wait for my brother, and there was the book title I had been searching for. I grabbed it and opened it to check out the price and, discovered my name and address inside, it was my book. What are the chances of that? What a strange experience to buy my old book back. Hand suggest that the probability of such a circumstance is approximately a million to 1 but it happened. Ah! or was meant to happen, it just depends how you interpret and attribute the information in hindsight, or was it a complete fluke a result of circumstance. I have had several other freak experiences like this, what Hand calls The Improbability Principle.

When we look at the language of the safety Deists in our midst we hear many speak with religious expressions such as ‘people chose to be unsafe’, ‘zero harm’, ‘all accidents are preventable’ and other fundamentalist expressions of absolute control in an uncertain and random universe. Then when something unpredictable happens the safety Deists look back in hindsight and using the Nostradamus rule of prediction, show how an incident could have been prevented.

What wondrous mastery and control safety Deists have with ‘all accidents are preventable’, amazing. Like pouring through the entrails of rats and reading the tea leaves, it’s so good to be able to predict the future by attribution to the past. It’s so good to talk about the presence of something (safety) by the absence of something else (injury data). Then with binary assumption in mind, deny the reality of randomness in the universe and turn the uncertainty of risk into the certainty of ‘black and white’ control.

So, what happens to the safety Deists when things fall apart, when randomness rules and things go wrong? Ah, then blame rules supreme and ‘I told you so’ is invoked. All ‘primed’ by the constant language of perfectionism in the workplace attributed to an uncertain world, excused by the nonsense of setting aspirational goals. No wonder people don’t report in safety Deist cultures, who wants to be found out for telling the wrong time.