ABSTRACT
Alternative approaches to safety, based on the concept of resilience (engineering), have gained momentum over the recent years. The benefits from these approaches is more than often presented in an either/or fashion, with strict compliance as the opposing position. This paper is founded on the belief that new horizons for human contribution to safety can be spotted from the positioning of resilience as a complement to prevalent safety approaches founded on compliance. The paper describes a methodological approach to combine resilience and prevalent (compliance) approaches. A founding premise is that the complementary relation between compliance and resilience as safety principles embodies a continuous, inherent dialectic. Resilience implies seeing the human as a resource rather than a problem/liability, and requires a distinct type of “bottom-up” mobilization of human as well as organizational capacities. Moreover, resilient practices will be infiltrated in prevalent practices in ways in which (the expectation of) compliance is the operational context for the unfolding and materialization of resilience. That is, resilience must to a certain extent unfold in the contextual shadow of a “rational façade” referring to compliance. The methodological approach (RICO) described in this paper comprises a combination of (1) “Hunting Low” through sensitization techniques aiming for the ability to spot manifestations of resilience in infiltrated safety practices, (2) “Hunting High” in terms of employing various theoretical resilience concepts in order to make sense of those practices for the purpose of mobilization of resilience-specific human and organizational capacities, and (3) “Hunting High and Low” in terms of sensitizing both practitioners and managers for the purpose of keeping track of and shaping the continuous and mutual constitution between compliance and resilience.
