Resilience engineering

Resilience engineering is an interdisciplinary field that treats safety not as the absence of failures but as the presence of adaptive capacity in complex sociotechnical systems. Originating in the analysis of high-risk domains — aviation, nuclear power, anesthesia, space flight — resilience engineering studies how organizations succeed under varying conditions rather than why they fail under ideal ones. The central insight, developed by researchers such as Erik Hollnagel, is that humans in complex systems are not a source of error to be eliminated but a source of flexibility to be cultivated. Resilience engineering focuses on four capacities: the ability to anticipate disruptions, to monitor the boundaries of safe operation, to respond to unfolding events, and to learn from both successes and near-misses. These capacities are properties of the system as a whole — including its technology, its people, and its institutional structure — rather than of any individual component. Resilience engineering therefore connects to safety science, human factors, and the broader theory of resilient systems.