Safety-II in Practice

Preface

Like a child, resilience engineering has grown, although it has not yet come of age. It also has a date – or at least a year – of birth and possibly even a place. The first gathering of experts to discuss resilience engineering was in October 2004, in the Swedish town of Söderköping. This means that resilience engineering at the time of writing (2016) is 12 years of age. The gestation period was, however, rather long. The first noted use of the term was a presentation that David Woods made in 2000 for NASA as it considered how better to manage risky missions following a series of space exploration accidents (Woods, 2000). In parallel to that Hollnagel (2001) began to explore safety as a balance – or imbalance – in a key trade-off between ...