Promoting safety by increasing uncertainty – Implications for risk management

• In certain circumstances deliberate increases in uncertainty are conducive to more safety.
• Balancing stability and flexibility and matching control and accountability are crucial for safety.
• Rule-making should incorporate ‘flexible rules’ to support adaptive action.
• Speaking up needs to be encouraged to incorporate sufficient divergent thinking in decision-making.
• Risk management is influenced by beliefs about what constitutes rational choice.

Recent developments in risk assessment acknowledge the need to capture both quantitative and qualitative uncertainties in order to better understand and manage risks. This paper goes a step further yet by arguing that existing uncertainties do not only have to be acknowledged in order to improve risk management and safety, but that in certain circumstances deliberate increases in uncertainty are conducive to more safety. Within a general framework of managing uncertainty, balancing stability and flexibility in work processes and matching control and accountability for these processes are proposed as criteria for decisions on reducing, maintaining, and increasing uncertainty. How operational and strategic decision-making involved in designing, employing and monitoring high-risk systems is affected by considering increasing uncertainty as a viable option is shown for two examples: rule-making where the most appropriate rules are not necessarily those that are most restrictive and thereby uncertainty-reducing, but rather ‘flexible rules’ that support adaptive action by providing degrees of freedom which initially raise rather than reduce uncertainty for the decision-maker; and speaking up which entails empowering people to voice concerns and doubts about a chosen course of action in ways that allow to incorporate the added uncertainty into sounder decision-making. Finally, decision-making in risk management is discussed more generally by drawing on current debates of what constitutes rational choice. In order to prepare the ground for capitalizing on the benefits of increasing uncertainty, the necessity to reflect on fundamental beliefs concerning human rationality is emphasized.