Introduction

“Creating foresight”, “anticipating future threats” and “how to be prepared for possible future surprises” are fundamental issues in managing today’s complex socio-technical systems. Traditional safety approaches use after-the-event data to evaluate the organisation’s safety level. This is based on the theoretical understanding that safety is seen as the absence of unwanted consequences. Consequently, managing safety is seen as the avoidance or elimination of negative outcomes. This safety approach follows the credo of improving safety by learning from errors and mishaps. Organisations with this understanding may learn from past events, but hardly pro-actively anticipate future threats.