ABSTRACT
The common use of the term resilience, within safety and elsewhere, has a negative connotation in the sense that it focuses on how an organisation handles diversity, stresses and disruptions. The purpose of resilience engineering is to ensure that an organisation can perform effectively in everyday conditions, in other words do everyday work successfully. Resilient performance can be seen as the synthesis in an actual situation or condition of an organisation's coping potentials; resilient performance is unlikely to be the expression of a single factor or ability but rather represents a nontrivial combination of several factors or potentials. Today references to resilience can be found in economics, pedagogics, psychology, sociology, risk management and network theory – and possibly in other places as well. The transition from ecology to business, in particular, changed resilience from being a passive to becoming an active characteristic.
