Engineering · Engineering Practice & Failure
A topic within Engineering Practice & Failure, itself one of 10 topics in that field and part of Engineering.
2 works
Stan Kaplan & B. John Garrick
Defines risk not as a single number but as the complete set of answers to three questions — what can go wrong, how likely is it, and what are the consequences — giving quantitative risk assessment a checkable structure rather than a single expected-value figure.
link checked 17 Sept 2026John Downer
Argues against Charles Perrow's normal accident theory: catastrophic failures in complex engineered systems are not statistically inevitable but trace to specific, correctable institutional and epistemic failures, and treating them as inevitable is itself a choice with consequences.