ABSTRACT
Resilience engineering attempts to understand and contribute to the design of resilient work systems. For a work system to achieve and maintain resilience, the practitioners involved must be able to: (1) actively anticipate potential failure paths and adapt work practices so as to avoid them; and (2) continuously evolve work practices so as to maintain operation within safe bounds while meeting efficiency/productivity objectives. We use examples drawn from the domains of railroad operations and military command and control to illustrate these points. We argue that in order to foster resilient operations, work-centred support system designs need to accommodate both formal and informal work practices, and to provide mechanisms to enable systems to evolve to keep pace with changes in work practices that will inevitably arise in response to changing work demands.
