Prologue: Resilience Engineering Concepts

Abstract

Resilience engineering is a paradigm for safety management that focuses on how to help people cope with complexity under pressure to achieve success. Techniques from many areas such as reliability engineering and management theory were used to develop 'demonstrably safe' systems. The assumption seemed to be that safety, once established, could be maintained by requiring that human performance stayed within prescribed boundaries or norms. One measure of resilience is therefore the ability to create foresight – to anticipate the changing shape of risk, before failure and harm occurs. The initial steps in developing a practice of Resilience Engineering have focused on methods and tools: to analyse, measure and monitor the resilience of organisations in their operating environment, to improve an organisation's resilience vis-a-vis the environment. The dominant safety paradigm was based on searching for ways in which limited or erratic human performance could degrade an otherwise well designed and 'safe system'.

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