Holling, C.S. “Engineering resilience versus ecological resilience.” Engineering within ecological constraints 31, no. 1996 (1996): 32.

‘Engineering resilience’ is not ‘resilience engineering’. One of the most common mistakes made by experts and newcomers is to use these two terms interchangeably as if they were same. Instead, each term refers to conflicting perspectives on what resilience means in engineered systems.

Hollnagel, Erik., Building Research & Information 42, no. 2 (2014): 221-228.

Resilience engineering and the Built Environment provides a brief overview of resilience engineering concepts and how they may apply in technological systems like infrastructure. Since the field of Resilience engineering is dominated by experts in social and systems sciences, the majority of research focuses attention on people, rather than discussing the characteristics of engineered systems and their relationships to the people that operate them. This paper offers a succinct overview of several concepts critical to resilience engineering theory and acts as a primer for each one.

Authors: Wears, Robert L., and L. Kendall Webb.
Publication: Resilience engineering in practice 2 (2014): 33-46.

“Things that never happened before happen all the time” Carl Sagan (1993)

‘Surprise’ underpins all resilience engineering theory and applications. The goal of resilience is to manage unexpected and unpredictable events in a successful and positive way, and the word surprise, by and large, encapsulates anything unexpected. This means the ways that experts think about “surprise”, understand what it is, and then deal with it helps establish a basis for designing resilient systems.

Author: Erik Hollnagel  Technical note publication date: 2015

Erik Hollnagel introduced the Resilience Analysis Grid as a method for accessing the resilience of a system by determining how it may perform in both known and unknown conditions.Hollnagel presents four capabilities or potentials that must be present for a system to exhibit resilient performance: 1) the ability to respond based on knowing what to do; 2) the ability to monitor based on knowing what to look for; 3) the ability to anticipate based on knowing what to expect; and 4) the ability to learn based on knowing what has happened. Because the four abilities make resilience performance possible, the resilience of a system can be assessed by identifying the extent to which each of the four abilities are present and supported in the system.