The Design of Everyday Things

by Donald A. Norman

Resilience engineering is a paradigm for safety management that focuses on how to help people cope with complexity under pressure to achieve success. It strongly contrasts with what is typical today—a paradigm of tabulating error as if it were a thing, followed by interventions to reduce this count. A resilient organisation treats safety as a core value, not a commodity that can be counted. Indeed, safety shows itself only by the events that do not happen! Rather than view past success as a reason to ramp down investments, such organisations continue to invest in anticipating the changing potential for failure because they appreciate that their knowledge of the gaps is imperfect and that their environment constantly changes. One measure of resilience is therefore the ability to create foresight—to anticipate the changing shape of risk, before failure and harm occurs.