By Ivonne Herrera (Norway), Sudeep Hedge (USA), Simon Gill (UK), Pedro Ferreira (Portugal), Elizabeth Lay (USA), Gesa Praetorius (Sweden)
Our heritage: The collaboration around the concept of resilience started in early 2000 with a meeting where a Core Group[1] of international experts discussed facets of it. Subsequently, “Resilience Engineering” emerged as a perspective to understand and improve safety in complex systems. As a visible outcome of this first symposium the book “Resilience Engineering: Concepts and Precepts[2]” was published. It marks the starting point for a transdisciplinary cooperation integrating knowledge from diverse lines of work and disciplines[3], addressing safety critical domains such as aviation, health care, railway, maritime, nuclear power, energy, road, industrial process control, telecommunication and financial services. The association was formally founded in 2011 with the intention of generating a “stand alone” structure to manage biennial symposia on resilience engineering. It was not long before wider aspirations started across the community and within a few years, the participative approach that trade-marks the work of the association was rapidly shaping.
Today, the Resilience Engineering Association has become a home for scientists and practitioners that are concerned with understanding the many facets, views and understandings of the term “resilience”. The initial focus was clearly built around safety and this remains a fundamental driver of resilience perspectives. Within resilience engineering[4],[5], the quest is not solely about safety but to support the capability of systems, organisations and societies to perform in such a way that both the overarching purpose and operational goals are successfully pursued, whilst taking into account the inevitable need to cope with rapid change and highly unpredictable conditions. Successful performance emerges, not in spite of adverse or changing conditions, but rather because systems develop and sustain the ability to generate opportunities for success from such changes. Further, the scope of resilience engineering has widened to not only address safety critical domains, but also consider critical services, such as web operations. It can be defined as follows:
” A system is resilient if it can adjust its functioning prior to, during, or following events (changes, disturbances, and opportunities), and thereby sustain required operations under both expected and unexpected conditions. [6]“
The initial collaboration has evolved into the Resilience Engineering Association (REA), a global community of researchers and practitioners. Today, the symposia on resilience engineering are opportunities to learn about as well to contribute to theoretical and practical progress from each other, discuss and evolve the understanding of resilience in the community of practice. The collaboration is now materialized and documented through symposium proceedings, journal articles, books, podcasts, webinars, newsletters, partnerships and friendships.
Our driver – what is different about resilience engineering and the association? The role of the REA is to create and support “inclusive, collaborative, engaging and useful arenas” where individuals and organisations are willing to participate, improve knowledge, thus co-creating processes and solutions manifested in formal and informal partnerships. These partnerships integrate practitioners and academics working together to improve resilient performance. The work involves themes such as understanding of empirical phenomena, patterns of adaptation, potential to anticipate, respond, monitor and learn, translation of knowledge and experience into methods, practices and capabilities relevant to diverse work settings. It includes both sharp-end operations, management and governance and embraces complexity, emergence, problems and opportunities that are relevant to our society. Resilience Engineering is underscored by a shift away from linear, deterministic, error-reducing approaches, towards recognizing and building upon the emergent adaptive capabilities in a system.
Our future: Our goal is to thrive, support and link resilience initiatives, scientists and practitioners around the world. It includes increasing knowledge through research and education, supporting the life cycle of resilience approaches from idea generation to truly exploitable solutions. A special focus of the association is to nurture and encourage young researchers to become future leaders through our Young Talents Program. So far there have been many developments in theory, and we see the near future focusing on resilience in action, the practical applications, and the use of knowledge and methods as a basis for growth.
[1] Core group and symposium participants include: René Amalberti (France), Lars Axelsson (Sweden), Richard Cook (USA), Vinh Dang (USA), Sidney Dekker (Sweden), Arthur Dijkstra (Netherlands), Rhona Flin (UK), Yushi Fujita (Japan), Andrew Hale (UK), Erik Hollnagel (Sweden-Danmark), Nancy Leveson (USA), Nick McDonald (Ireland), Jean Pariès (France), Gunilla Sundström (USA), Ron Westrum (USA), David Woods (USA), John Wreathall (USA)
[2] The English version is translated to other languages such as Japanese and Spanish
[3] Include e.g. safety science, ergonomics, sociology, cognitive ergonomics, organisational and management sciences, system safety, management of safety, emergence response, patient safety, cognitive systems engineering, software engineering, system engineering, aerospace engineering, nuclear engineering, regulation, organisational resilience, resilience engineering, change and innovation.
[4] Longstaff PH, Koslowski TG, Geoghegan W. (2013) Translating Resilience: A Frame- work to Enhance Communication and Implementation. In: Proceedings of the fifth Symposium on Resilience Engineering, resilience engineering association
[5] Woods, D. D., 2015. Four concepts for resilience and the implications for the future of resilience engineering. Reliability Engineering & System Safety, Volume 141, pp. 5-9
[6] https://erikhollnagel.com/ideas/resilience-engineering.html