Resilience times four

hollnagel-resilience-engineeringResilience. It is not so much about reducing the number of things that go wrong, but it is about improving the number of things that go right. So says Erik Hollnagel in the opening prologue of  Resilience Engineering in Practice, a book he co-edited with several others. To me this means that resilience thinking turns risk management thinking on its head, and resilience engineering, so Hollnagel, rests on responding, monitoring, anticipating and learning. In that order. But why are these four elements so crucial to resilience?

Risk matrix and risk management redefined

What Hollnagel means is that the ability to respond to events, the ability to monitor ongoing developments, the ability to anticipate future threats – and importantly, future opportunities, and that the ability to learn from past failures and successes is what makes a business resilient, or an organisation, or society for that matter.

Personally, I have always seen the learning part as important to resilience, much like Liisa Välikanga wrote in her book on The Resilient Organization. But where Välinkanga focusses on an organisation that is innovative, robust, adaptable and strong, an organization that is engaged, competitive and strives for success, Hollnagel focusses on an organisation that is, well, uhm…resilient? Just  that, simple and beautiful.

hollnagel-2011

Hollnagel’s range of outcomes



Hollnagel relinquishes the good old risk matrix, because he thinks it is too concerned with the negative and too concerned with what we fear. The risk matrix perspective tends to overstate the importance of preparing for worst-case scenario, instead of looking at how the world really is. Normally, things go right, very right, even if they start out wrong. Therefore, he describes a new model, that includes the positive side as well, and that takes into account the full range of outcomes to any situation.

Four possible outcomes

Hollnagel divides the outcomes into four possibilities:

Positive outcomes that have a high probability – things that not only go right, but that are also intended to go right.

Positive outcomes that have a low probability – things that happen, not because they were meant to happen, but they just happened, sometimes out of sheer luck.

Negative outcomes with a low probability – things that go wrong, often unexpected, but less often unimaginable, and more often than not with dire consequences.

Negative outcomes with a high probability – things that go wrong, which must realistically (or statistically) be expected to happen, however, usually without serious consequences.

In my opinion, this way of looking at the world not only  makes us spend less efforts on preventing low-probability-high-consequence events, or Black Swans as Nassim Taleb calls them. Instead it enables us to spend more efforts on making things go right and looking at why and how things go right.

This point of view is essential to resilience engineering. According to Hollnagel, in Resilience Engineering sees”things that go wrong” as the flip side of “things that go right”, assuming that hey are the result of the same underlying process.

It therefore makes as much senses to try to understand why things go right as to understand why they go wrong. In fact it makes much more sense because there are many more things that go right than wrong. Resilience Engineering argues that it is necessary to look at success as well as at failures precisely in order to understand why things go wrong. There are no fundamental differences between performance that leads to failure and performance that leads to success.

Hollnagel defines resilience as

the intrinsic ability of a system to adjust its functioning prior to, during, or following changes and disturbances, so that it can sustain required operations under both expected and unexpected conditions

and argues that this definition emphasises the ability of the system to function under both expected and unexpected conditions, not just to avoid failure or withstand adversity. Hence, it is wiser for an organisation to do more things right than to do less things wrong. Learning from success, not learning from failure, is the key to sustaining any business.

Four cornerstones of resilience

In my previous post on vulnerability and resilience in transport networks I already mentioned them. Today I will examine them one-by-one:

Knowing what to do, that is, how to respond to regular and irregular disruptions and disturbances, either by a prepared set of measures or by adjusting normal functioning. This is the ability to address the actual.

Knowing what to look for, that is, how to monitor that which is or can become a threat or in the near term, both in the environment and in the system itself. That is the ability to address the critical.

Knowing what to expect, that is, how to anticipate developments, threats and opportunities further into the future, such as potential changes, disruptions, pressures and their consequences. That is the ability to address the potential.

Knowing what has happened, that is, how to learn from experience, in particular how to learn the right lessons from the right experiences – successes as well as failures. That is the ability to learn.

This figure illustrates how the cornerstones work together:

hollnagel-cornerstone-resilience

Hollnagel’s four cornerstones of resilience

Critique

Perhaps I shouldn’t be too hard on this, but Hollnagel states that resilience engineering must look at both sides of the coin, things that go right and things that go wrong. I can see that in the first cornerstone, what to do, and the fourth cornerstone, what has happened. In the second cornerstones it is missing. I for one would say that that what to look for should not only include near term threats, but also long-term opportunities. However, it does seem to appear in the third cornerstone, what to expect, where opportunities is mentioned.

Conclusion

This is a brilliant discussion of what resilience is all about. I must admit that I haven’t read all the other chapters in the book,yet this introduction stands out as a marvel in explaining in simple words what the core issue is. Nothing here that is “academically interesting, but practically totally irrelevant”, as I like to say about some research. This is not only academically sound, it is also practically sound, and I look forward to putting this into practice in my line of work.

Reference

Hollnagel, E. (2011) Prologue: the scope of resilience engineering. In: Hollnagel, E., Dédale, J.P., Woods, D., Wreathall, J. (Eds.) Resilience Engineering in Practice: A Guidebook. Ashgate, pp. xxix–xxxix.

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