Resilience Engineering Perspectives, Volume 1 Remaining Sensitive to the Possibility of Failure

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 ensured by constraining performance and eliminating risks. Instead, it is necessary to actively manage how people and organizations adjust what they do to meet the current conditions of the workplace, by trading off efficiency and thoroughness and by making sacrificing decisions. The Ashgate Studies in Resilience Engineering series promulgates new methods, principles and experiences that can complement established safety management approaches, providing 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. Published periodically within this series will be edited volumes titled Resilience Engineering Perspectives. The first volume, Remaining Sensitive to the Possibility of Failure, presents a collection of 20 chapters from international experts. This collection deals with important issues such as measurements and models, the use of procedures to ensure safety, the relation between resilience and robustness, safety management, and the use of risk analysis. The final six chapters utilise the report from a serious medical accident to illustrate more concretely how resilience engineering can make a difference, both to the understanding of how accidents happen and to what an organisation can do to become more resilient.

Contents: Preface, Erik Hollnagel; Resilience and restlessness, Ron Westrum; Resilience engineering: the birth of a notion, Christopher P. Nemeth; The need for 'translators' and for new models of safety, Jean-Christophe Le Coze and Michèle Dupré; Measures of resilient performance, David Mendonca; Unexampled events, resilience, and PRA, Steve Epstein; Safety management - looking back or looking forward, Erik Hollnagel; When resilience does not work, Akinori Komatsubara; Rules management as source for loose coupling in high-risk systems, Gudela Grote; Work practices and prescriptions: a key issue for organizational resilience, Dimitris Nathanael and Nicholas Marmaras; Crew resilience and simulator training in aviation, Sidney Dekker, Nicholas Dahlström, Roel van Winsen and James M. Nyce; Underlying concepts in robustness and resilience and their use in designing socio-technical systems, Bernard Pavard, Julie Dugdale, Nargès Bellamine-Ben Saoud, Sandrine Darcy and Pascal Salembier; Stress-strain plots as a basis for assessing system resilience, David D. Woods and John Wreathall; Designing resilient critical infrastructure systems using risk and vulnerability analysis, Kurt E. Petersen and Henrik Johanssen; Towards a resilient approach of safety assessment: experiences based on the design of the future air traffic management system, Oliver Sträter; Resilience in the emergency department, Robert L. Wears, Shawna J. Perry, Shilo Anders and David D. Woods; The Beatson event - a resilience engineering perspective, John Wreathall; What went wrong at the Beatson Oncology Centre?, Richard I. Cook, Christopher P. Nemeth and Sidney Dekker; Resilience, safety and testing, Steve Epstein; Detecting an erroneous plan: does a system allow for effective cross-checking?, Matthieu Branlat, Shilo Anders, David D. Woods and Emily S. Patterson; Investigations as an impediment to learning, Eric Hollnagel; Analysis of the Beatson event, Pierre Le Bot; Appendix; Bibliography; Indexes

Professor Erik Hollnagel, Industrial Safety Chair, École des Mines de Paris - Pôle Cindyniques, France, Christopher P. Nemeth, Research Associate, Department of Anesthesia and Critical Care, The University of Chicago, Chicago, USA and Sidney Dekker is Professor and Director of the Key Centre for Ethics, Law, Justice and Governance at Griffith University in Brisbane, Australia. Previously Professor at Lund University, Sweden, and Director of the Leonardo Da Vinci Center for Complexity and Systems Thinking there, he gained his Ph.D. in Cognitive Systems Engineering from The Ohio State University, USA. He has worked in New Zealand, the Netherlands and England, been Senior Fellow at Nanyang Technological University in Singapore, Visiting Academic in the Department of Epidemiology and Preventive Medicine, Monash University in Melbourne, and Professor of Community Health Science at the Faculty of Medicine, University of Manitoba in Canada. Sidney is author of several best-selling books on system failure, human error, ethics and governance. He has been flying the Boeing 737NG part-time as airline pilot for the past few years. The OSU Foundation in the United States awards a yearly Sidney Dekker Critical Thinking Award.