Environmental Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
this gap will make it impossible for the organization to calibrate its
understanding or model of itself and thereby undermine processes of learning
and improvement. Understanding what produces the gap can drive learning
and improvement and prevent dependence on local workarounds or conformity
with distant policies. There was universal agreement across the symposium
attendees that previous research supports the above as a critical first principle.
The practical problem is how to monitor this gap and how to channel what is
learned into organizational practice.
Since the beginning of the 1990s there has been a growing evolution of
the principles for organizational resilience and in the understanding of the
factors that determine human and organizational performance [12]. As a result,
there is an appreciable basis for how to incorporate human and organizational
risk in life cycle systems engineering tools and how to build knowledge
management tools that proactively capture how human and organizational
factors affect risk. While additional studies can continue to document the role
played by adaptive processes for how safety is created in complex systems,
this topic marks the beginning of a transition in resilience engineering from
research questions to engineering management tools. Such tools are needed to
improve the effectiveness and safety of organizations confronted by high
hazard and high performance demands. In particular, we believe that further
advances in the resilience paradigm should occur through deploying the new
measures and techniques in partnership with management for actual hazardous
processes. Such projects will have the dual goals of simultaneously advancing
the research base on resilience and tuning practical measurement and
management tools to function more effectively in actual organization decision-
making.
Resilience in its original-ecological sense has been defined in two
different ways in the ecological literature [13,14] There is no right or wrong
use of the term. Rather, the different usage emphasizes two distinct stability
properties.
The first definition (1) concentrates on stability near an equilibrium steady
state, where the rate and speed of return to pre-existing conditions after a
disturbance event are used to measure the property [15]. Resilience is then
defined as the time required for a system to return to a steady state following a
disturbance. This definition matches the etymological meaning of the term
resilience.
The second definition (2) emphasizes conditions far from any equilibrium
steady state, where instabilities can shift a system to another basin of attraction
which is controlled by a different set of variables and characterized by a
