The Development of a holistic IT platform for major risk assessment and management: the MIRA tool

There are natural human cognitive biases that affect many aspects of our activities, including major risk management. Some of these have a common characteristic, namely the reification process related to our tendency to selectively seek or interpret information in a way that confirms our representations of reality, and which can lead to forgetting that our representations are in some way abstractions, or hypotheses, and as such, must be continually questioned, analysed and checked against reality. The moment we forget that the correspondence between our representations and reality is only a conditional truth and requires constant verification, is the moment when most human and organizational errors in major risk management can occur. How to fight against this? This is the question that preoccupied us during ten years of research, starting within the European Tosca project (see Leva et al. 2019, Anzirsi et al. 2019), and that still haunts us today. This article presents the problem to be solved and the envisaged solution, based on an IT tool allowing to organize the dialogue between the risk assessment and management stakeholders. This solution has been designed with the SNOI, which is responsible for the French part of the NATO pipeline network in Central Europe.