Work backwards from what happened
Most incident reports stop at the last person to touch the system: the driver, the operator, the worker who slipped. Reverse analysis keeps going, back through the network and its history, until it finds what made the outcome possible.
The four steps
Isolate the terminal state, S(T)
Describe what happened as it was observed, without blame or moral language. A fractured heel, a vehicle in the work zone, a destroyed house.
Map the network, G(T) and R(T)
Every relationship and interface that was active, including the ones that were severed and the nodes that should have been there but weren't: a sensor never fitted, a sign never placed, a call never made.
Interrogate the memory, M(T)
The strain already loaded before the day: fatigue, speed blindness, habits, cultural drift, old injuries.
Invert for the true karma, E*(T−1)
Ask what input, travelling through that network with that history, would actually produce this outcome. Often it is far smaller than the story suggests.
E*(T−1) = F⁻¹( S(T) | G(T−1), M(T−1), R(T−1) )
The 771 kJ road cone paradox
Plain English
A 2-tonne ute at 100 km/h carries the same energy as dropping it off a 13-storey building. A 4.5 kg road cone cannot stop that, and isn't meant to.
The cone is a message to the driver's brain. A long, gradual taper makes the road look narrower, and the driver slows without being told. Halve the speed and three-quarters of the crash energy is gone before the vehicle reaches anyone.
So when a crash happens beside a blind corner with no warning signs, "bad driving" is the shallow answer. The deeper one is a safety network that never woke the driver up.
Deep physics
Kinetic energy entering the work zone:
Because energy scales with v², every speed reduction removes a disproportionate share. Equivalent drop height h = v²/2g: 39.3 m at 100 km/h.
771.6 kJ
| Zone | Speed | Energy | Removed vs 100 km/h |
|---|
Scrub through the history
The roadworks breach as a network over time. Drag the slider: strain thickens the edges, a missing node goes dark, and the final state only makes sense once you've seen what came before.
Five cases, one method
| Case | Terminal Brahma | True Karma | Fascia and missing nodes | What it teaches |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Sunline, the champion mare | 32 wins, back-to-back Cox Plates (1999, 2000). | Front-running race tactics with minimal bit restraint, a hallmark of trainer Trevor McKee. | An unrestricted head and neck, letting ground forces return elastically through the limbs instead of loading as shear. | Aligning karma with the network's natural elasticity lets energy flow instead of tearing. |
| A rear-end collision, then a confrontation | A low-speed rear-end crash, followed by a heated exchange that ended calmly. | A moment of driver distraction away from the road ahead; then an aggressive approach from the other driver. | The visual link between driver and road briefly severed. Afterwards, a calm disposition absorbed the aggression instead of passing it on. | Today's brahma becomes tomorrow's fascia: a settled temperament can stop a conflict loop from escalating. |
| Roadworks breach | An errant vehicle enters an active work zone. | 771.6 kJ of kinetic energy: 2,000 kg at 100 km/h. | Driver speed blindness after a long highway run; a truncated taper with no optical deceleration zone; advance warning signs missing on a blind approach. | Temporary traffic management is engineered fascia, designed to interrupt a saturated driver's memory before the energy arrives. |
| Kitchen fire | A house destroyed by flashover. | Cooking oil ignited on a gas burner by an intoxicated cook. | No smoke alarms installed: a missing sensor node, compounded by dulled human senses. | An open-loop network: without its sensor, a small local event compounds into total loss. |
| Collapse near the finish | A heel fracture two rungs from the ground; a crash 100 m from home. | Small, routine inputs: a misstep, a minor steering correction. | The body and mind dropping tension before the hazard has actually cleared: the Internal Wetsuit going slack too early. | Failure clusters where context relaxes before the risk does. |