ABSTRACT
Discourses about resilience have differed over the role that negotiating trade-offs plays in resilient performance. One view expressed by leading thinkers on resilience engineering is that trade-offs are an essential characteristic of resilience when they involve ‘sacrifice decisions’ in which agents sacrifice lower-for higher-level goals (Hoffman and Woods, 2011b; Woods, 2012; Woods and Branlat, 2011b; Woods and Cook, 1998). Conversely, other leading thinkers have asserted that trade-offs are so ubiquitous in complex work that they cannot characterise resilient performance with any specificity (Hollnagel, 2009b, 2013). In this chapter, we take an agnostic view on this debate and instead try to develop a better understanding of a particular sort of trade-off ubiquitous in safety and performance issues in health care: the individual-collective trade-off.
