Safety-II in Practice

Chapter 2What does ‘resilience’ mean?

The aim of this book is to present a practical way to develop and manage an organisation’s resilience potentials in order to ensure – as far as possible – that the organisation can cope with the expected and unexpected conditions it is certain to encounter. The writings about resilience engineering have from the very beginning made clear that resilience was associated with what an organisation did – how it performed – and not with what that an organisation had – what it was. Resilience refers to a characteristic way in which an organisation performs – meaning what it does and how it does – rather than to a characteristic of an organisation per se, to a quality or to something that an organisation has. In ...