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. About the Author: Erik Hollnagel became Industrial Safety Chair at École des Mines de Paris in 2006, after having been Professor of Human-Machine Interaction at Linköping University, Sweden, since 1999. He has previously worked at several industries, research institutes and universities including the OECD Halden Reactor Project (N), Human Reliability Associates (UK), Computer Resources International (DK), University of Copenhagen (DK) and Risø National Laboratory (DK). He is an internationally recognised specialist in the fields of industrial safety, human reliability analysis, cognitive systems engineering, and complex human-machine systems and author of more than 350 publications including 12 books. Christopher P. Nemeth, Ph.D., CHFP, is a Research Associate (Assistant Professor) in the Cognitive Technologies Laboratory in the Department of Anesthesia and Critical Care at the University of Chicago, Illinois, USA. His work encompasses human factors and design, particularly human performance in high-hazard environments. Christopher's design and human factors consulting practice and corporate career have encompassed a variety of application areas, including healthcare, transportation and manufacturing. As a consultant he has performed human factors analysis, expert witness and product development services. Sidney Dekker (Ph.D. The Ohio State University, 1996) is Professor of Human Factors and System Safety and Director of Research at Lund University School of Aviation in Sweden. Author of Ten Questions About Human Error (Erlbaum, 2005) and the top-selling Field Guide to Understanding Human Error (Ashgate, 2006), he has been appointed as Scientific Advisor on Healthcare System Safety to the Winnipeg Regional Health Authority in Canada, and is visiting professor in the Department of Epidemiology and Preventive Medicine at Monash University in Melbourne, Australia.