Why Are Safety Efforts Sometimes Not Cost-Effective

While there are certainly some very effective safety engineering programs, too many expend a large amount of resources with little return on the investment in terms of improved safety. To fix a problem, we first need to understand it. Why are safety efforts sometimes not cost-effective lliere are five general answers to this question  

The techniques used are not appropriate for the systems we are building today and for new technology. 

Systems are usually assumed to be static throughout their lifetime. 

Superficial, isolated, or misdirected safety engineering activities Often, safety engineering consists of performing a lot of very costly and tedious activities of limited usefulness in improving safety in the final system design. Childs calls this cosmetic system safety [37]. Detailed hazard logs are created and analyses 

One of the reasons System Safety has been so successful is that it takes the opposite approach an attempt is made to show that the system is unsafe and to identify hazardous scenarios. By using this alternative perspective, paths to hazards are often identified that were missed by the engineers, who tend to focus on what they want to happen, not what they do not want to happen. 

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