The U.S. Federal Aviation Administration’s (FAA’s) new compliance philosophy1 has introduced an oversight approach that proactively manages risks through the “identification and control of existing or emerging safety issues” and by concentrating resources on mitigating risk and problem solving. Traditionally, safety professionals focused on controlling known hazards while also trying to anticipate if or when unknown hazards would surface (Figure 1). For example, a special issue of Risk & Regulation in 2010 devoted eight articles2 to a discussion of risk management related to close calls, near misses and early warnings. The articles represented different industries and issues, ranging from oil refinery accidents to failures in physicians’ clinical performance to vulnerabilities in nuclear reactors.
To complicate matters, many definitions of risk exist, depending on whether the word is used in everyday conversation or by experts in different domains. …
