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Resilience engineering depends on four abilities: the ability a) to respond to what happens, b) to monitor critical developments, c) to anticipate future threats and opportunities, and d) to learn from past experience - successes as well as failures. They provide a structured way of analysing problems and proposing practical solutions. This book is divided into four sections which describe issues relating to each of the four abilities. The section's chapters emphasise practical ways of engineering resilience, featuring case studies and real applications.

The prologue to this book outlines the broad defining characteristics - the four cornerstones - of Resilience Engineering. One of these is monitoring. Every organisation concerned with safety has one or more metrics that are used to judge whether the levels of safety in the organisation are acceptable. Using a common definition of safety, the organisation needs to know if it is 'free from unacceptable risk'. This metric is often the number or rate of accidents or injuries (or deaths) over some period of time or the time between events as shown by Figure 5.1. Figure 5.1 Typical industrial safety sign (Photo © Sheena Chi, 2009)

This chapter shows that how a product of work performed to develop leading indicators of organizational performance can be adapted to reflect the kinds of issues of interest in the development of resilience engineering. The concepts of resilience and the anticipated tools for resilience engineering are intended to address these weaknesses head on. Thus, resilience engineering is a new management discipline that encompasses both safety management and other types of management, particularly process and financial management. The themes identified in the review are management commitment, awareness, preparedness, flexibility, reporting culture, learning culture, and opacity. The seven themes in highly resilient organizations are: Top-level commitment, Just culture, Learning culture, Awareness, Preparedness, Flexibility and Opacity. Systems engineering techniques exist for describing formally the behavior of organizations and how in reality the organization manages to accomplish its goals. Many of these techniques stem from the work of the soft systems modelers in the late 1970s and 1980s, such as the work by Checkland.