A new perspective on how to understand, assess and manage risk and the unforeseen

There are many ways of understanding, assessing and managing the unforeseen and (potential) surprises. The dominating one is the risk approach, based on risk conceptualisation, risk assessment and risk management, but there are also others, and in this paper we focus on two; ideas from the quality discourse and the use of the concept of mindfulness as interpreted in the studies of High Reliability Organisation (HRO). The main aim of the paper is to present a new integrated perspective, a new way of thinking, capturing all these approaches, which provides new insights as well as practical guidelines for how to understand, assess and manage the unforeseen and (potential) surprises in a practical operational setting. (C) 2013 The Authors. Published by Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.