ABSTRACT
The purpose of managing work is to ensure that acceptable outcomes occur with the intended frequency, speed and reliability – which also means that the number of unacceptable outcomes is kept to a practical minimum. Resilience engineering has proposed that the following four potentials are necessary for resilient performance: potential to respond; potential to monitor; potential to learn; and potential to anticipate. The four potentials proposed here can easily be recognised in many descriptions and analyses of events, and the four taken together seem to be sufficient without being redundant. Accepting that the four potentials are necessary, one is justified to ask whether also they are sufficient or whether a fifth or a sixth potential may be required. Three obvious candidates are the potential to plan, the potential to communicate and the potential to adapt. It is important that resilience is thought of as the expression of the resilience potentials rather than a unitary quality of an organisation.
