Not just rearranging the deckchairs on the Titanic: Learning from failures through Risk and Reliability Analysis

How do we learn from failures? and Why do we need to learn from failures? These seemingly simple questions are yet quite profound and we need to dig deeper to explore suitable answers. In this paper an empirical study based on the analysis of reported disasters is provided with the aim of exploring techniques that can help us to understand the root causes of why those incidents occurred and how such crises unfold over time and hence how can we learn generic lessons from those disasters. (c) 2012 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.