Facilities and Public Spaces conference offers answers to improbable failure Speakers at Conferenz’s Safe and Secure Facilities and Public Spaces conference in August presented various strategies aimed at protecting public places against ‘improbable’ security threats, writes chief editor Nicholas Dynon. In the previous issue of NZSM, I wrote that the Christchurch mosque attacks had provided security managers with a new set of problems, with employers and customers now asking them: “How do we make our sitting-duck venue, which is easily accessible by large numbers of people on a predictable basis, secure against the extremely unlikely possibility of a terrorist attack? And how do we do it cheaply?” It’s the classic Black Swan problem of how to prepare for – and invest in protecting against – an event as unknowable and unlikely as it is potentially catastrophic.
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In their presentations, Dean Kidd (Manager Safety and Security at Auckland Live) and Stewart O’Reilly (Manager Behavioural Analysis at SecureFlight Ltd) both made reference to James Reason’s famous Swiss Cheese Model, a model of accident causation used in risk analysis and risk management. In Reason’s model, an organisation’s defences against failure are represented as slices of cheese. The holes in the slices represent weaknesses in individual parts of the system and they vary randomly in size and position across the slices. The system produces failures when a hole in each slice momentarily aligns, permitting (in Reason’s words) “a trajectory of accident opportunity”. At any given time, one might safely assume that the layers of cheese are
enough to defend an organisation against failure. But in the off circumstance that Murphy’s Law wins out and the holes in the slices align, statistically improbable instances of failure can – and do – occur. Such is the nature of a black swan event, and thus Reason’s model is useful in not only conceptualising vulnerabilities to threats but also in identifying defences. It’s also a handy model for me to structure this article around in terms of describing how various speakers at the conference presented their examples of security defences and failures. Cheese slices The slices of cheese in the Swiss Cheese Model can be thought of as layers of security, and in Reason’s four-slice model these layers include the following:
December 2019/January 2020
