Resilience Engineering

Prologue: Resilience Engineering Concepts

David D. Woods

Erik Hollnagel

Hindsight and Safety

Efforts to improve the safety of systems have often – some might say always – been dominated by hindsight. This is so both in research and in practice, perhaps more surprising in the former than in the latter. The practical concern for safety is usually driven by events that have happened, either in one’s own company or in the industry as such. There is a natural motivation to prevent such events from happening again, in concrete cases because they may incur severe losses – of equipment and/or of life – and in general cases because they may lead to new demands for safety from regulatory bodies, such as national and international administrations and agencies. ...