The causes of the next unwanted event, incident, accident, or life-changing experience already exists today in your operation.  While historically some have anecdotally stated that we have stopped finding ne ways to hurt people in operations, to think that the causes of the next event already exist in the  currnt operations begins to be a little mire succient and specific.  In fact, in some ways it is a little scary to think about.  And we should use that concern/fear to fuel our chronic unease about our operations and to incite better surveillance, monitoring and detection processes to search out and find these causes before they actually cause us a problem or hurt someone.

This perpective of thinking that the causes of the next event already exists should be a warning for leaders, supervsors and workers to fight against complacency and reinvigorate their commitment to searching for hazards, conditions and causes of potential future incidents.  Just becuases something bad has not happened does not mean that the procedure, actions or activities used or followed were inherently correct.  Nor does it mean that the conditions in which the work was done was benign; it could simply have been luck and not good management that resulted ina  non event.  As people commited to eliminating hazards nd negative outcomes, we cannot rely on luck, but must put our trust in theprocesses we use to assure ourselves of the positive outcomes we expect.  And part of that assurance processes is the constant and unending search for breakdowns, errors and violations and ensuring and constant level of unease to fuel our search.