Originally Posted by Mimpe
I've never felt comfortable with Prof Reason's "swiss cheese safety" description. It implies that environments such as aviation and medical care are naturally benign, with multiple protections in place, all functioning to optimum. Sounds nice on paper.
Ummm, if that's your takeaway from the Swiss Cheese Model, that of a benign environment withe perfect safeguards then I know why you don't feel comfortable with it. It's because you don't understand it at all. Not even a little bit. Seriously. The inherent assumptions are that the environment is fraught with peril, and the safeguards are imperfect.
That's the whole reason he used *swiss* cheese, as opposed to cheddar because *swiss* cheese has many large holes in it. You see; those holes in the slices of cheese are metaphors for defects, flaws, sub-optimalities, to use your parlance, in the safeguards.