Environmental Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
measures and methods, resilience engineering recognizes the need to study
safety as a process, provide new measures, new ways to monitor systems, and
new ways to intervene to improve safety. Thinking in terms of resilience shifts
inquiry to the nature of the ‗surprises' or types of variability that challenge
control.
•
If ‗surprises' are seen as disturbances, or disrupting events, which
challenge the proper functioning of a process, then inquiry centers on
how to keep a process under control in the face of such disrupting
events, specifically on how to ensure that people do not exceed given
‗limits.'
•
If ‗surprises' are seen as uncertainty about the future, then inquiry
centres on developing ways to improve the ability to anticipate and
respond when so challenged.
•
If ‗surprises' are seen as recognition of the need constantly to update
definitions of the difference between success and failure, then inquiry
centers on the kinds of variations which our systems should be able to
handle and ways constantly to test the system's ability to handle these
classes of variations.
•
If ‗surprises' are seen as recognition that models and plans are likely
to be incomplete or wrong, despite our best efforts, then inquiry
centers on the search for the boundaries of our assessments in order to
learn and revise.
Resilience engineering entails a shift from an over-reliance on analysis
techniques to adaptive and co-adaptive models and measures as the basis for
safety management [11]. Just as it acknowledges and tries to avoid the risks of
reification (cf. above), it also acknowledges and tries to avoid the risks of
oversimplifications, such as:
•
working from static snapshots, rather than recognizing that safety
emerges from dynamic processes;
•
looking for separable or independent factors, rather than examining
the interactions across factors; and
•
modeling accidents as chains of causality, rather than as the result of
tight couplings and functional resonance.
It is fundamental for resilience engineering to monitor and learn from the
gap between work as imagined and work as practiced. Anything that obscures
