Managing Risk (PDF)

The human element is the principle cause of incidents and accidents
in all technology industries; hence it is evident that an
understanding of the interaction between humans and technology is
crucial to the effective management of risk. Despite this, no
tested model that explicitly and quantitatively includes the human
element in risk prediction is currently available.

Managing Risk: the Human Element combines descriptive and
explanatory text with theoretical and mathematical analysis,
offering important new concepts that can be used to improve the
management of risk, trend analysis and prediction, and hence affect
the accident rate in technological industries. It uses examples of
major accidents to identify common causal factors, or
"echoes", and argues that the use of specific
experience parameters for each particular industry is vital to
achieving a minimum error rate as defined by mathematical
prediction. New ideas for the perception, calculation and
prediction of risk are introduced, and safety management is covered
in depth, including for rare events and "unknown"
outcomes

* Discusses applications to multiple industries including
nuclear, aviation, medical, shipping, chemical, industrial,
railway, offshore oil and gas;

* Shows consistency between learning for large systems and
technologies with the psychological models of learning from error
correction at the personal level;

* Offers the expertise of key leading industry figures involved
in safety work in the civil aviation and nuclear engineering
industries;

* Incorporates numerous fascinating case studies of key
technological accidents.

Managing Risk: the Human Element is an essential read for
professional safety experts, human reliability experts and
engineers in all technological industries, as well as risk
analysts, corporate managers and statistical analysts. It is also
of interest to professors, researchers and postgraduate students of
reliability and safety engineering, and to experts in human
performance.

"...congratulations on what appears to be, at a high
level of review, a significant contribution to the
literature...I have found much to be admired in (your)
research" Mr. Joseph Fragola - Vice President of
Valador Inc.

"The book is not only technically informative, but also
attractive to all concerned readers and easy to be comprehended at
various level of educational background. It is truly an excellent
book ever written for the safety risk managers and analysis
professionals in the engineering community, especially in the high
reliability organizations..." Dr Feng Hsu, Head of
Risk Assessment and Management, NASA Goddard Space Flight
Center

"I admire your courage in confronting your theoretical
ideas with such diverse, ecologically valid data, and your success
in capturing a major trend in them....I should add that I find
all this quite inspiring . ...The idea that you need to find
the right measure of accumulated experience and not just routinely
used calendar time makes so much sense that it comes as a shock to
realize that this is a new idea", Professor Stellan
Ohlsson, Professor of Psychology, University of Illinois at
Chicago