Resilience engineering has become a recognized alternative to traditional approaches to safety management. Whereas these have focused on risks and failures as the result of a degradation of normal performance, resilience engineering sees failures and successes as two sides of the same coin - as different outcomes of how people and organizations cope with a complex, underspecified and therefore partly unpredictable environment. Normal performance requires people and organizations at all times to adjust their activities to meet the current conditions of the workplace, by trading-off efficiency and thoroughness and by making sacrificing decisions. But because information, resources and time are always finite such adjustments will be approximate and consequently performance is variable. Under normal conditions this is of little consequence, but every now and then - and sometimes with a disturbing regularity - the performance variability may combine in unexpected ways and give rise to unwanted outcomes. The Ashgate Studies in Resilience Engineering series promulgates new methods, principles and experiences that can complement established safety management approaches. It provides invaluable insights and guidance for practitioners and researchers alike in all safety-critical domains. While the Studies pertain to all complex systems they are of particular interest to high-hazard sectors such as aviation, ground transportation, the military, energy production and distribution, and healthcare.
By Erik Hollnagel, Jeffrey Braithwaite
August 28, 2015
Health care is everywhere under tremendous pressure with regard to efficiency, safety, and economic viability - to say nothing of having to meet various political agendas - and has responded by eagerly adopting techniques that have been useful in other industries, such as quality management, lean ...
Edited
By Erik Hollnagel, Jean Pariès, John Wreathall
November 01, 2013
Resilience engineering has since 2004 attracted widespread interest from industry as well as academia. Practitioners from various fields, such as aviation and air traffic management, patient safety, off-shore exploration and production, have quickly realised the potential of resilience engineering ...
By Gunilla Sundström, Erik Hollnagel
March 31, 2017
The recent financial crisis has made it paramount for the financial services industry to find new perspectives to look at their industry and, most importantly, to gain a better understanding of how the global financial system can be made less vulnerable and more resilient. The primary objective of ...
By Robert L. Wears, Erik Hollnagel
March 12, 2015
Health systems everywhere are expected to meet increasing public and political demands for accessible, high-quality care. Policy-makers, managers, and clinicians use their best efforts to improve efficiency, safety, quality, and economic viability. One solution has been to mimic approaches that ...
By Christopher P. Nemeth, Erik Hollnagel
April 21, 2016
This is the fifth book published within the Ashgate Studies in Resilience Engineering series. The first volume introduced resilience engineering broadly. The second and third volumes established the research foundation for the real-world applications that then were described in the fourth volume: ...
By Christopher P. Nemeth, Erik Hollnagel
June 28, 2008
In the resilience engineering approach to safety, failures and successes are seen as two different outcomes of the same underlying process, namely how people and organizations cope with complex, underspecified and therefore partly unpredictable work environments. Therefore safety can no longer be ...