In the twentieth century we have had an enormous increase of our human capabilities; we have put satellites in orbit, we made immense progress in curing diseases and physical harm, we have transport systems to carry people all over the world in under 24 hours, and we can control our money with one touch on a smartphone. Inherent to these activities is the fact that these things can turn bad every now and then. Although the globalization and technological revolutions are mushrooming in front of our eyes, our ways of explaining failure are lagging behind. The incidents, accidents and disasters that we are confronted with nowadays are beyond the reach of our traditional theories and models to explain failure. The trend we see today is that our progress on safety comes to a hold. We have made our systems immensely complex in our efforts to be more productive.
