Resilience Engineering in Practice

Prologue: The Scope of Resilience Engineering

Erik Hollnagel

The focus for safety efforts is usually, and traditionally, the unwanted outcomes, injuries, and losses that are the result of adverse events. This matches the common understanding of safety as ‘freedom from unacceptable risk.’ Resilience Engineering, however, defines safety as the ability to succeed under varying conditions. It is a consequence of this definition that it is equally important to study things that go right as things that go wrong. For Resilience Engineering, the understanding of the normal functioning of a socio-technical system is the necessary and sufficient basis for understanding how it fails. And it is both easier and more effective to increase safety by improving ...