Advancing resilient performance: from instrumental applications to second-order solutions

Abstract

Resilience and resilience engineering were initially thought of in a binary fashion. Just as safety was juxtaposed to accidents or harm, resilience was juxtaposed to brittleness. This became the basis for a number of instrumental applications, of fixes with little understanding of the causal dynamics. Binary thinking is easy on the mind, but it is usually misleading and insufficient as a basis for practical steps. In order properly to advance resilient performance we need to develop second-order solutions. To do so we must slow down to ensure a deeper understanding of the non-trivial dynamics that govern not just the challenges of our work environments but also how we cope with them.