Cindynic concepts - Understanding their nature and benefits

Cindynics brings together all the sciences and techniques aimed at making endogenous and exogenous hazards and risks (natural, technological, etc.) perceptible and therefore identifiable. It enables the identification of intangible risks, such as those arising from behavioral factors (repression, values, beliefs, etc.) of the organization's various stakeholders. Once these risks have been identified, they can be assessed and addressed.

It was during an inter-industry symposium in December 1987 that the term cindynic was coined from the Greek root meaning danger.

The concepts underpinning the cindynic approach derive from the many lessons learned from the analysis of major disasters such as Bhopal, Challenger and Chernobyl, as well as the multitude of diffuse risks such as road accidents and domestic activities. They were then developed on the basis of the day-to-day practice of the Risk Manager function in companies.

Cindynics represents a systemic study of the evolution of situations faced by organizations, with the aim of assessing whether this evolution is favorable or unfavorable to the achievement of objectives. The term "situation", the founding concept of cindynics, is to be understood in the sense of the Larousse dictionary as "the set of events, circumstances and concrete relationships in the midst of which a person or group finds itself".

The cindynical approach is particularly well-suited to understanding the dysfunctions of our complex systems, whether they be technical, organizational, human, financial, judicial or ecosystemic, as it currently enables us to provide the most appropriate responses to the insidious drifts of these systems.

Indeed, for any complex system, we need to take into account both the second principle of thermodynamics, which states that "Any isolated system left to its own devices increases its disorder", and James Reason's teaching "All man-made systems contain potentially destructive agents, just like pathogens in the human body. At any given moment, any complex system has a number of latent failures, whose effects are not immediately apparent, but which can lead to dangerous actions and weaken the system's defense mechanisms. For the most part, they are tolerated, detected and corrected, or monitored by protective measures comparable to our immune systems.

The raison d'être of cindynic approaches is to :

• explain the nature of "internal or external pathogens" in systems, particularly those whose effects...