Resilience Engineering

‘This is the most thought-provoking collection of papers I’ve read in a very long time. They are written by the best in the field at the top of their form. Resilience is a notion whose time has come. We cannot realistically expect to eliminate adverse events and still stay in business. But we can strive to achieve greater robustness towards our operational hazards. This book tells us how to do it and why it’s necessary.’ James Reason ‘This book is the next frontier for improving safety in healthcare, aviation, nuclear power and other high technology systems. Innovative and intellectually challenging, Resilience Engineering emphasises the importance of learning about the positive side of safety management; focusing on how frontline staff foresee, adapt and recover from problems. It is an essential read for managers, regulators, academics and operators alike.’ Jane Carthey, National Patient Safety Agency in England and Wales, UK ‘From my point of view the main achievement of the book is that it provides a turn in the perspective on system safety, from a mainly reactive “hindsight” perspective reflected in the numerous attempts to learn from events and accidents to a more proactive one focusing on the interrelation of safety and the characteristics of organizations as dynamic systems. Although I would hesitate to share the view of Dave Woods that this already represents a paradigm shift in safety research, I am at least convinced that the views and ideas presented in the book provide very important contributions to the understanding of high reliability organizations.’ Human Factors and Ergonomics Society Newsletter. 2006 Featured in list ‘Selected Works on Resilience, 2001-12’ in Chronicle of Higher Education’s The Chronicle Review, May 10, 2013

Erik Hollnagel became Industrial Safety Chair at MINES ParisTech, France, in 2006, after having been Professor of Human-Machine Interaction at Linkoping University, Sweden, since 1999. 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. David D. Woods is Professor at the Institute for Ergonomics, Ohio State University, USA, and Past-President of the Human Factors and Ergonomics Society. He currently serves on a National Academy of Engineering/Institute of Medicine Study Panel to improve healthcare systems and on a National Research Council panel on research to define the future of the national air transportation system. Nancy Leveson is Professor of Aeronautics and Astronautics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, USA. She works in the areas of system safety, human-computer interaction and software engineering, in a variety of industries including nuclear power, space systems, aviation, medical devices and transportation. David D. Woods, Erik Hollnagel, Yushi Fujita, Andrew Hale, Tom Heijer, Jean Paries, Ron Westrum, Richard I. Cook, Sidney Dekker, Nancy Leveson, Nicolas Dulac, David Zipkin, Joel Cutcher-Gershenfeld, John Carroll, Betty Barrett, Lars Axelsson, Nick McDonald, Arthur Dijkstra, Christopher Nemeth, Rhona Flin, Gunilla Sundstrom, Rene Amalberti, John Wreathall, Frank Guldenmund, Louis Goossens.