Accident causation and Newton

Many sociotechnical systems exhibit non-linear behaviors, emergent properties, and interactions that cannot be accurately captured by Newtonian thinking and models alone.

Earlier this week we were discussing causation models in the classroom and the much loved, abused and misused Tripod-Beta model came up.

This discussion triggered me, and the next day I once again dusted off my pig-eared copy of 'Controlling the Controlablle' by Jop Groeneweg.

I have two copies of the book. The first copy I received right at the start of my carreer when I made the 'risky' switch from engineering to safety. I attended the Shell HSE Tools and Techniques training in the Netherlands. Back then the Shell Learning Centre was still situated in Noordwijkerhout, before it was moved to its much more corporate setting in Rijswijk, Den Haag.

It's a complicated story how I got there, to Shell in Noordwijkerhout, which I can write something more about later.

Suffice to say that I treasure this first copy of the book and do all my doodling in the 2nd copy, albeit the condition of both are a little... used.

I decided this week to have a new look at the Tripod-theory, but through the lens of modern developments in Psychology and Quantum Particle physics, with the proviso that I do not want to abuse or misuse any of it due to my lack of expertise.

Four days later, this morning to be exact, I had boiled down my learning to one simple fact:

The marble already exists.

Prof. Groenweg uses the metaphor of a marble perched precariously on a rough plateau that when acted on by 'forces' will roll off and result in either an incident or an accident. Chaos and fractals explain the environment and newtonian physics, the forces. The incident pathways are infinite and thus placing barriers becomes a guesing game.

There a is a quantum model of this model from Professor Groeneweg's book, but that in itself is another book.

Suffice to say, for the purposes of this article that from a quantum perpspective the Marble (Incident), has already happened. The incident path from there is already (mostly) known because the largely deterministic environment of the newtonian world into which it came into being has already been (mostly) predicted along with it (The Marble).

It is similar to developing the top event in a bowtie model, which I still find to be the most difficult part of developing a bowtie.

If we want to take the important work done by Prof. Groeneweg into the future we need to do two things:

1. Go quantum.
2. Separate the apples from the pears. Stop mixing up Newton and Einstein. Deterministic and Probabalistic.

I'll leave this here and will follow up with more articles and discussions, but I suddenly feel like a game of marbles.

Anyone?

By the way, yesterday I received my new toy. A set of microSNATOMS. Maybe I will go play around with that. Similar to marbles, toch?