Resilience Engineering in Practice, Volume 2

Chapter 3

Fundamental on Situational Surprise: a Case Study with Implications for Resilience

Robert L. Wears and L. Kendall Webb

Things that never happened before happen all the time (Sagan, 1993).

Introduction

Surprise is inherently challenging to any activity; it challenges resilient action, since by definition it cannot be anticipated, and for some types of surprises, monitoring is limited by both lack of knowledge about what to target and the absence of precursor events or organisational drift (Dekker, 2011; Snook, 2000) that might have provided even soft signals of future problems. It does, however, present opportunities both for responding and for learning. In this chapter we describe a critical incident involving information technology ...