At the moment there is so much mythology being pushed by Safety on the preference of systems as some kind of solution for blame. Part of the mythology is that ‘blame fixes nothing’ a nonsense slogan that only HOP could concoct. Here are a few questions to ponder:

• What is this thing called ‘systems’?
• Who creates these ‘systems’?
• What ethic is embedded in the system design?
• Are these systems closed, open, dialectical, ecological or mechanistic?
• Is the system tight or loosely-coupled (Weick)?
• Is the system hierarchical, flat, circular or trans-dimensional?
• Do these systems seek understand fallibility or indeed, encourage fallibility?
• How do these systems engage the conscious, non-conscious, pre-conscious or unconscious nature of humans in being and organising?
• What kind of metaphors are used to understand systems?
• Are these systems seen as computational, algorithmic, embodied or beyond time, space and matter? Indeed, do they have a life of their own?
• How does the law and the courts understand systems?

When we read these slogans and simplistic projects about systems in risk and safety they are often simplistic as if Systems are singular, objective and impartial.

Then here is the big question: how can shifting blame from individuals to systems change anything about the way risk is managed? Indeed, how to you prosecute a system when it cannot be separated from the designers and owners of the system?

So much of the discourse that floats about in HOP, S2 etc about systems is simplistic and creates more problems than it solves. If you want to preach systems as something archetypical (and common to the HOP myth), have you asked any of these questions listed above?

And of course, if ‘blame fixes nothing’ then even the idea of blaming a system must also fix nothing!