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Why history matters
Perhaps, as I once did, you think that history is just something to look back on with interest but you are much more focused on the future? Over the years I have sat through many debates about 'reactive' and 'proactive' safety, and still think it is a misguided debate, but in doing so have increasingly realised that history is the source of all our forward thinking and prediction, even in the world of risk! Ultimately as we try to predict where things are likely to go wrong (as we must in our roll of risk guardians) we are always starting from the point of looking back to understand how it all comes together in unfortunate ways. Data gathering is about building a history that does effectively inform us, enabling us to make the respectable decisions we need to make, the arguement about proactive and reactive is nothing more than an opinion on the acceptability of the the happenings from which that data is born!
It is not just us in the safety domain that need to be welcoming of 'history', as we all probably observe our politicians need to do so also:
www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2016/09/dont-know-much-about-history/492746/