JULIAN TALBOT

When an accident is serious, tragic, and technically complex, the hardest task is often not collecting information, but making sense of competing explanations . Different witnesses see different things. Technical systems interact in ways that are not obvious. Early narratives can harden before the evidence is fully examined. NOTE: The MRH-90 incident is a real-world example of a tragic event. This ACH example is broadly accurate but is no substitute for the actual report find

In litigation, coronial inquiries, and high-stakes policy disputes, the hardest problem is rarely a lack of information. It is the opposite: too many facts, too many narratives, and too many incentives pushing decision-makers toward a preferred explanation long before the evidence has been properly weighed. Once a narrative takes hold, everything that follows tends to be interpreted through it. Contradictory facts are minimised, explained away, or ignored. Confirmatory materi

When people hear the phrase risk assessment , they often imagine a spreadsheet, a heat map, or a list of obvious hazards ranked from red to green. In routine operational settings, that may be sufficient. In the context of a lobby effort, a coronial inquiry, or litigation, it is not even close. In these environments, risk assessment is not an administrative task. It is a discipline of structured reasoning under uncertainty , carried out in full view of sceptical decision-maker

Following on from my previous post, Risk Communication Issues, if we want to understand why otherwise knowledgeable health professionals...