ABSTRACT
Resilience Engineering represents a way of thinking about safety that departs from conventional risk management approaches. A system's resilience captures the result that failures are breakdowns in the normal adaptive processes necessary to cope with the complexity of the real world. Managing resilience, or resilience engineering, then, focuses on what sustains or erodes the adaptive capacities of human-technical systems in a changing environment. The focus on system resilience emphasizes the need for proactive measures in safety management: tools to support agile, targeted, and timely investments to defuse emerging vulnerabilities and sources of risk before harm occurs. Resilience engineering should help organizations decide when to relax production pressure to reduce risk, or, in other words, develop tools to support sacrifice decisions across production/safety tradeoffs. While assessing technical hazards is one kind of input into Resilience Engineering, the goal is to monitor organizational decision making.
