Abstract
Resilience Engineering is an emerging discipline (Hollnagel et al., 2006) which aims to enhance an organization's ability to target safety investments proactively in the face of ongoing production and economic pressures. Synthesizing across studies of successful and unsuccessful organizations reveals that failures emerge from breakdowns in the normal adaptive processes used to cope with complexity. Success belongs to organizations, groups and individuals who are resilient in the sense that they recognize, adapt to, and absorb variations, changes, disturbances, disruptions, and surprises – especially disruptions that fall outside of the set of disturbances the system is designed to handle (Rasmussen, 1990; Rochlin, 1999; Weick et al., 1999; Sutcliffe & Vogus, 2003; Cook and Rasmussen, 2005). Resilience Engineering seeks to measure and enhance an organizations ability to adapt to change and surprise. Resilience Engineering represents a paradigm shift for safety management. In a world of finite resources, of irreducible uncertainty, and of multiple conflicting goals, effective organizations create safety through proactive resilient processes rather than through reactive barriers and defenses. This paper presents some basic concepts related to resilience and some of the ongoing debates related to defining adaptive capacity. Monitoring and managing resilience, or its absence, brittleness, is concerned with understanding how a system adapts and to what kinds of disturbances in the environment it adapts to.
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