Karl Weick talks about mindfulness in his book on HROs. This state of mind is both individual and organizational -– if an organization can be said to have a mind — and is an idea that several other authors describe using different terms. Reason (I think) has called it “perpetual paranoia”. When I was sailing in the BVI last week, my instructor told me much the same thing in the context of avoiding collisions: “The first rule is never to assume that the other guy knows what he’s doing!” Mindfulness, I submit, is something that forms part of expertise. If you know what to expect, and can resist the temptation to be a “yes-man” and look for confirmatory evidence, then you are more likely to notice discrepancies. Looking for movement is one of the things our brain is set up to detect, and a difference from the norm is also a kind of movement, although not in a temporal dimension. Another Karl, Karl Popper, talks about the asymmetry of evidence in proving, versus disproving, a hypothesis. Famously, he talks about how the hypothesis that “all swans are white” cannot be proved by observing white swans, no matter how many white swans you observe, but can be disproved by the observation of a single black swan. This mindfulness, the ability to look for evidence to indicate that the things are not what they should be is, I submit, what regulatory agencies need to embrace; they should drop this silly idea of becoming a proactive organization. Proactive means “Acting in advance to deal with an expected difficulty.” This is a lofty goal and I don’t think it can be achieved. What can be achieved, however, is to improve mindfulness and retain the agility to react more quickly and expertly to deviations from the norm. I may see a deviation but sill not knows what to expect, but have a notion that it’s reducing safety. I don’t need to know how that deviation will play out because there may be other deviations that form part of the safety chain that I haven’t observed. Reacting to such cues may appear to a novice observer as being “proactive” but it isn’t – it’s just that the expert is reacting to cues that are not observable to the novice.