Structured what-if technique¶
A facilitated prospective hazard-analysis method using systems structure, guidewords, and repeated 'what if?' prompts to identify failure scenarios, consequences, safeguards, and actions.
Core Idea¶
SWIFT is a team-based, relatively rapid alternative or precursor to more exhaustive methods such as HAZOP or FMEA, with coverage depending on preparation, facilitation, expertise, and documentation. The team partitions the system or process, applies prompts to functions and deviations, traces plausible causes and effects, records existing controls, rates or routes risks, and assigns follow-up actions. The abstraction is therefore identified by a declared carrier, a transformation or constraint over that carrier, and an invariant that tells an analyst whether the named structure is genuinely present.
Scope of Application¶
Structured what-if technique belongs to risk and safety analysis and is useful where the analyst can specify the typed risk and safety analysis carrier, defining objects and relations, parameters, conventions, evidence, boundary cases, and comparison targets, then evaluate scope, system representation, multidisciplinary participants, guidewords, prompt coverage, scenario records, consequence and safeguard analysis, risk criteria, action ownership, and limitations are explicit. The scope is broad within that domain but bounded by the need for scope, system representation, multidisciplinary participants, guidewords, prompt coverage, scenario records, consequence and safeguard analysis, risk criteria, action ownership, and limitations are explicit. Conceptual hazard-analysis identity only; it is not a substitute for mandated analyses, domain standards, quantitative studies, or qualified safety engineering.
Clarity¶
The abstraction clarifies a crowded vocabulary by making scope, system representation, multidisciplinary participants, guidewords, prompt coverage, scenario records, consequence and safeguard analysis, risk criteria, action ownership, and limitations are explicit the center of the account. A claim should name the carrier, the governing operation or relation, the applicable assumptions, and the recognition test. A bare label is insufficient because the name Structured what-if technique can be used for a formal identity, an implementation, or a neighboring result unless carrier and convention are stated.
Manages Complexity¶
Without the abstraction, an analyst must reason directly over many local details: the carrier roles, admissibility assumptions, competing conventions, derived invariants, boundary cases, and proof or validation obligations specific to Structured what-if technique. Structured what-if technique compresses them into the roles in the structural signature. That compression permits comparison across instances without erasing the variables that determine validity. It also exposes which details may be varied safely and which are constitutive.
Abstract Reasoning¶
- Identify the carrier. State what the elements, states, objects, or observations are: the typed risk and safety analysis carrier, defining objects and relations, parameters, conventions, evidence, boundary cases, and comparison targets. Reject examples whose alleged carrier belongs to a different problem. 2. Lock the constitutive rule. Express scope, system representation, multidisciplinary participants, guidewords, prompt coverage, scenario records, consequence and safeguard analysis, risk criteria, action ownership, and limitations are explicit independently of one notation or implementation.
Knowledge Transfer¶
Knowledge transfers strongly among subfields of risk and safety analysis because they reuse the typed risk and safety analysis carrier, defining objects and relations, parameters, conventions, evidence, boundary cases, and comparison targets, The team partitions the system or process, applies prompts to functions and deviations, traces plausible causes and effects, records existing controls, rates or routes risks, and assigns follow-up actions., and type the carrier, state every parameter and convention in the definition, test that scope, system representation, multidisciplinary participants, guidewords, prompt coverage, scenario records, consequence and safeguard analysis, risk criteria, action ownership, and limitations are explicit, compare the nearest accepted identity, and report counterexamples, uncertainty, and limiting cases.
Relationships to Other Abstractions¶
Current abstraction Structured what-if technique Domain-specific
Parents (1) — more general patterns this builds on
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Structured what-if technique is a kind of Thought Experiment Prime
The proposed strict upward parent is
prime:thought_experiment.
Hierarchy paths (2) — routes to 2 parentless roots
- Structured what-if technique → Thought Experiment → Counterfactual Reasoning
- Structured what-if technique → Thought Experiment → Mental Model → Representation → Abstraction
Neighborhood in Abstraction Space¶
Structured what-if technique sits in a crowded region of the domain-specific corpus (31st percentile for distinctiveness): several abstractions share nearly its structure, so a description that fits it tends to fit its neighbors too.
Family — Risk, Scheduling & Operational Control (32 abstractions)
Nearest neighbors
- Engineering analysis — 0.90
- Hazard elimination — 0.90
- Structured analysis and design technique — 0.90
- Failure cause — 0.90
- Work systems — 0.90
Computed from structural-signature embeddings · 2026-09-08