Updating Rasmussen’s Triangle for a Modern World
If you’ve ever seen a talk of mine on safety, you’ve probably heard me refer to the Rasmussen Triangle:
Introduced in Dr. Jens Rassmussen’s 1997 “Risk Management in a Dynamic Society: A Modelling Problem,” if you run in Safety Science circles, you may have seen it stylized in a variety of ways, including the one I created for talks on the subject.
The original triangle didn’t include the concept of “The Discretionary Space,” exactly: Dr. Sidney Dekker coined that term in his 2012 book Just Culture:
A system creates all kinds of opportunities for action. And it also constrains people in many ways. Beyond these opportunities and constraints, we could argue that there remains a discretionary space, a space that can only be filled by an individual care-giving or technology-operating human. This is a final space in which a system really does leave people freedom of choice (to launch or not, to go to open surgery or not, to fire or not, to continue an approach or not). It is a space filled with ambiguity, uncertainty, and moral choices.
With AI (general and otherwise) being the foremost tech industry zeitgeist of the now, I thought Rasmussen’s Triangle might be due for an update, so it can continue to aptly model risk in the AI-driven dynamic society we find ourselves inexorably hurdling toward…
