Exploring Resilience

Front matter

SPRINGER BRIEFS IN APPLIED SCIENCES AND TECHNOLOGY - SAFETY MANAGEMENT e i \Wiica

Exploring Resilience A Scientific Journey trom Practice to on seme maui G) Sp rin ger Open

SpringerBriefs in Applied Sciences and Technology

Contents

Siri Wiig and Babette Fahlbruch

2 Resilience, Reliability, Safety: Multilevel Research CC hallenGes A E ed EE EEEE ETTET Jean-Christophe Le Coze

3 Moments of Resilience: Time, Space and the Organisation Carl Macrae

Chapter 1 A) Exploring Resilience — An Introduction get Siri Wiig and Babette Fahlbruch

Abstract Resilience has become an important topic on the safety research agenda and in organizational practice. In this chapter we give an introduction to the research area and some of the current challenges, before we present the aim of the book.

Keywords Resilience - Safety - Research - Organizational practice - Theoretical framework

1.1 Resilience — What Is It?

Resilience has become an important topic on the safety research agenda and in organizational practice (e.g. [1—6]). Numerous definitions of resilience exist within different research traditions, disciplines, and fields such as sociology, psychology, medicine, engineering, economics, ecology, political science [7—11]. The common use of the resilience concept relates to the ability of an entity, individuals, community, or system to return to normal condition or functioning after the occurrence of an event that disturbs its state.

Many similarities can be observed across the resilience concept applications [8, 9, 12]. We often see resilience research literature referring to dynamic capabilities, adaptive capacity, and performance variation as key topics. Some group resilience literature into three general areas related to readiness and preparedness; response and adaptation; and recovery or adjustment and argue that researchers attempt to broadly cover all three areas in one study, but individually each area receives limited attention resulting in a diverse literature base [9]. Others have identified domains of

S. Wiig (BI)

Faculty of Health Sciences, SHARE-Centre for Resilience in Healthcare, University of Stavanger, Stavanger, Norway

e-mail: siri.wiig @uis.no

B. Fahlbruch

TÜV NORD EnSys, Berlin, Germany e-mail: bfahlbruch @tuev-nord.de

© The Author(s) 2019 1 S. Wiig and B. Fahlbruch (eds.), Exploring Resilience, SpringerBriefs in Safety Management, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-03189-3_1

2 S. Wiig and B. Fahlbruch resilience such as: the Organizational domain — addressing the need for enterprises to respond to a rapid changing business environment; the Social domain — addressing capabilities of individuals, groups, community and environment to cope with external stress; the Economic domain — addressing the inherent ability and adaptive response that enable firms and regions to avoid maximum potential loss; and the Engineering domain — which is mainly adopted within in the safety science as the intrinsic ability of a system to adjust its functionality in the presence of disturbance and unpredicted changes [8]. The resilience engineering (e.g. [13, 14]) domain has attracted a wide readership in the safety science the past decade, although it has a history going back to the 1980s and rooted in cognitive system engineering, human factors, and system safety engineering [3].

1.2 Some Current Challenges

The shared use of the resilience term across different traditions does not imply unified concepts of resilience nor theories in which it is embedded [12]. In the resilience literature in more general there has been a strong focus on building theories, however there is lack in empirically proving the theories [9, 15]. This is also true for resilience as it is used in the safety science [10, 14]. The current body of knowledge on complex adaptive systems and resilience has increased our understanding of organizations and the challenges they face in particularly in relation to social and technological complexity, but it suffers from being too generalized and abstract. Identification of what constitutes resilience has hardly been clarified under the onslaught of theorizing and individual empirical cases [16]. A recent systematic review demonstrates that some scientific efforts have been made to develop constructs and models that present relationships; however, these cannot be characterized as sufficient for theory building [10, 17]. Other attempts to model resilience theoretical frameworks (e.g. [18]) lack empirical testing. The current lack of well-defined constructs is a scientific drawback within the safety science, as it is too unclear which phenomena are to be operationalized [10].

There is a need to develop a coherent integrative theoretical framework of resilience mechanisms to enable large-scale comparative longitudinal studies across multiple high-risk settings and sectors (e.g. healthcare, transport, petroleum, nuclear power) and countries [19, 20]. A major current research challenge is the absent integration of different system levels from individuals, teams, organizations, regulatory bodies, and policy level [10, 14, 21, 22], implying that mechanisms through which resilience is linked across the micro/meso/macro level are not yet well understood. For example, most current research addresses activities of front-line workers (micro level) (e.g. [1]) and stresses factors of work system design, while top management teams (meso level) [23] and leadership for organizational adaptability [24], external contextual factor and regulatory system (macro level) are lacking as key resilience dimensions in theoretical frameworks. Regulation is often the first lever that policy makers and professional bodies reach for to drive improvements in safety, yet the relationship between regulation and resilience remains little explored and the role

1 Exploring Resilience — An Introduction 3 of regulation in producing or potentially undermining resilience performance, needs investigation and theorizing [21, 25].

The role of stakeholders in resilience is underexplored. Despite the literature within for example healthcare focusing on patient and next of kin as co-creators of resilience, studies lack involvement of stakeholders [26, 27]. High-risk industries depend on collaboration across numerous stakeholders, of potential influence on resilience within organizations and in a societal perspective. In order to understand how individuals, groups, organizations and communities need to adapt and respond to internal and external change and context, stakeholder analysis (e.g. [28]) could add to the body of knowledge in resilience. This is also of relevance for the practical and operational approaches to resilience in terms of developing targeted strategies for different stakeholders and to establish for example collaboratives for sharing knowledge across levels to foster resilience when it depends on inter-professional collaboration and collaboration across system interfaces (e.g. [29, 30]), and across different conceptualizations of resilience, safety and security which are often in contradiction (e.g. [31, 32]). Currently, this area needs exploration of new approaches to ensure operationalization of resilience as a multi-stakeholder phenomenon.

The latter illustrates that there are not only theoretical and empirical research challenges related to resilience research. There are also challenges related to the translation of theory into practice by providing practical guidance to different stakeholders, on how to design and operate resilient organizations and to maintain resilience (e.g. [33]). There is a need for developing testable propositions and interventions related to resilience and exploring this in guided iterative cycles of design and evaluation [10, 11]. However, how this best should be operationalized is still unclear. We argue in line with [1] that it would be interesting to widen the perspective of resilience applied in the safety domain by looking at how other scientific domains operationalize it, and through this may gain new insight and possible improvement in both theory building and translation of theory into interventions and practical solutions.

1.3 What Is This Book Looking for?

This book does not advocate for one definition or one field of research when talking about resilience; it does not assume that the use of resilience concepts is necessarily positive for safety. We encourage a broad approach, seeking inspiration across different scientific and practical domains for the purpose of further developing resilience at a theoretical and an operational level of relevance for different high-risk industries. The aim of the book is twofold:

1. To explore different approaches for operationalization of resilience across scientific disciplines and system levels.

2. To create a theoretical foundation for a resilience framework across scientific disciplines and system levels.

S. Wiig and B. Fahlbruch

By presenting chapters from leading international authors representing different research disciplines and practical fields we develop suggestions and inspiration for the research community and for practitioners in high-risk industries.

3:

J. Bergström, R. van Winsen, E. Henriqson, On the rationale of resilience in the domain of safety: a literature review. Reliab. Eng. Syst. Saf. 141, 131-141 (2015)

C.P. Nemeth, I. Herrera, Building change: resilience engineering after ten years. Reliab. Eng. Syst. Saf. 141, 1-4 (2015)

J.-C. Le Coze, Vive la diversité! High reliability organisation (HRO) and resilience engineering (RE). Saf. Sci. (2016, In press)

. E. Hollnagel, J. Braithwaite, R.L. Wears (eds.), Resilient Health Care (Ashgate, Farnham,

. J. Braithwaite, R.L. Wears, E. Hollnagel, Resilient health care: turning patient safety on its

. M. Pillay, Resilience engineering: an integrative review of fundamental concepts and directions for future research in safety management. Open J. Saf. Sci. Technol. 7(4), 129-160 (2017)

. X. Xue, L. Wang, R.J. Yang, Exploring the science of resilience: critical review and bibliometric

. S. Hosseini, K. Barker, J.E. Ramirez-Marquez, A review of definitions and measures of system resilience. Reliab. Eng. Syst. Saf. 145, 47-61 (2016)

. R. Bhamra, S. Dani, K. Burnard, Resilience: the concept, a literature review and future direc-

. A.W. Righi, T.A. Saurin, P. Wachs, A systematic literature review of resilience engineering:

research areas and a research agenda proposal. Reliab. Eng. Syst. Saf. 141, 142-152 (2015)

. A. Annarelli, F. Nonino, Strategic and operational management of organizational resilience:

current state of research and future directions. Omega 62, 1—18 (2016)

. P. Martin-Breen, J.M. Anderies, Resilience: a literature review. Technical Report, The Bellagio

Initiative (2011)

. E. Hollnagel, D.D. Woods, N. Leveson (eds.), Resilience Engineering: Concepts and Precepts

(Ashgate, Aldershot, 2006)

. R. Patriarca, J. Bergström, G.D. Gravio, F. Costantinoa, Resilience engineering: current status of the research and future challenges. Saf. Sci. 102, 79-100 (2018)

. E.A.M. Limnios, T. Mazzarol, A. Ghadouani, S. Schilizzi, The resilience architecture framework: four organizational archetypes. Eur. Manag. J. 32, 104—116 (2014)

. K.A. Pettersen, P.R. Schulman, Drift, adaptation, resilience and reliability: toward an empirical clarification. Saf. Sci. (2016, in press)

. R.I. Sutton, B.M. Staw, What theory is not. Adm. Sci. Q. 40(3), 371-384 (1995) . J. Lundberg, B.J.E. Johansson, Systemic resilience model. Reliab. Eng. Syst. Saf. 141, 22-32

L.K. Comfort, A. Boin, C.C. Demchak, Resilience revisited - an action agenda for managing extreme events, in Designing Resilience: Preparing for Extreme Events (University of Pittsburgh Press, Pittsburgh, 2010)

M.A. Hitt, P.W. Beamish, S.E. Jackson, J.E. Mathieu, Building theoretical and empirical bridges across levels: multilevel research in management. Acad. Manag. J. 50(6), 1385-1399 (2007) C. Macrae, Reconciling regulation and resilience in health care, in Resilient Health Care ed. by E. Hollnagel, J. Braithwaite, R.L. Wears (Ashgate, Farnham, 2013)

J. Bergström, S.W.A. Dekker, Bridging the macro and the micro by considering the meso: reflections on the fractal nature of resilience. Ecol. Soc. 19(4) (2014)

Exploring Resilience — An Introduction 5

A. Carmeli, Y. Friedman, A. Tishler, Cultivating a resilient top management team: the importance of relational connections and strategic decision comprehensiveness. Saf. Sci. 51, 148-159 (2013)

M. UhI-Bien, M. Arena, Leadership for organizational adaptability: a theoretical synthesis and integrative framework. Leadersh. Q. 29(1), 89-104 (2018)

R. Bal, A. Stoopendaal, H. van de Bovenkamp, Resilience and patient safety: how can health care regulations contribute? Nederlands Tijdschrift voor Geneeskunde 159 (2015)

C.C. Schubert, R. Wears, R.J. Holden, G.S. Hunte, Patients as a source of resilience, in Resilient Health Care, Volume 2: The Resilience of Everyday Clinical Work, ed. by R.L. Wears, E. Hollnagel, J. Braithwaite (Ashgate, Farnham, 2015), pp. 207-225

C. Vincent, R. Amalberti, Safer Healthcare (Springer, Berlin, 2016)

R. Brugha, Z. Varvasovszky, Stakeholder analysis: a review. Health Policy Plan. 15(3), 239-246 (2000)

M. Storm, I. Siemsen, K. Laugaland, D. Dyrstad, K. Aase, Quality in transitional care of the elderly: key challenges and relevant improvement measures. Int. J. Integr. Care 14 (2014) K.A. Laugland, Transitional care of the elderly from a resilience perspective. Ph.D. thesis, University of Stavanger (2015)

K.A. Pettersen, T. Bjgrnskau, Organizational contradictions between safety and security - perceived challenges and ways of integrating critical infrastructure protection in civil aviation. Saf. Sci. 71, 167-177 (2015)

R. Østgaard Skotnes, Challenges for safety and security management of network companies due to increased use of ICT in the electric power supply sector. Ph.D. thesis, University of Stavanger (2015)

E. Lay, M. Branlat, Z. Woods, A practitioner’s experience operationalizing resilience engineering. Reliab. Eng. Syst. Saf. 141, 63-73 (2015)

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Chapter 2 A) Resilience, Reliability, Safety: Multilevel get Research Challenges Jean-Christophe Le Coze

Abstract This chapter contributes to current research on resilience by considering two aspects of this topic. The first describes the popularity of resilience as a product of a shift of era which creates a degree of uncertainty about the future in several domains of concern in a globalised context, and how this notion has also travelled in the field of safety. The second part addresses the cognitive, institutional, methodological, empirical and theoretical challenges of interdisciplinary multilevel safety research.

Keywords Multilevel research - Methodology - Interdisciplinarity - Fieldwork Ethnography

2.1 A Resilience Moment

The success of the notion of resilience is to be understood in the context of a shift of era. Climate change related events, economic turmoil of countries and companies in international competition, technological developments with uncertain consequences, identities struggling under macro globalised processes shaking the status of nation-states... these trends have created a favourable background for terrorist attacks, natural catastrophes, technological disasters and financial crisis which have in turn created a very favourable moment in history for a notion such as resilience.

Globalisation processes of increased flows of people, goods, information, images, money across the space and time beyond anything comparable in previous epochs have created entire new contexts for nation-states, businesses and populations... and safety. New kind of threats from and to critical infrastructures of our societies — energy, transport, medical, administrative, informational networks — now exist. These threats are both endogenous in terms of managing their sheer complexity and exogenous in terms of terrorists or natural catastrophes exposures for instance. They are global [1, 2].

J.-C. Le Coze (EX) Ineris, Verneuil-en-Halatte, France e-mail: lecoze @ineris.fr

© The Author(s) 2019 7 S. Wiig and B. Fahlbruch (eds.), Exploring Resilience, SpringerBriefs in Safety Management, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-03189-3_2

8 J.-C. Le Coze

In this situation, resilience, defined as the ability “to proactively adapt to and recover from disturbances that are perceived within the system to fall outside the range of normal and expected disturbances” [3], or as “the intrinsic ability of an organisation (system) to maintain or regain a dynamically stable state, which allows it to continue operations after a major mishap and/or in the presence of a continuous stress” [4], offers a very generic and programmatic statement in order to cope in a world of greater uncertainties and systemic threats to these critical infrastructures [5].

It is now common to read about the need and call for resilience in a very wide range of publications, in areas such as globalisation processes, ecology, business strategy, urban dynamics, financial markets and personal life. Globalisation should be resilient, economies should be resilient, companies should be resilient, banks should be resilient, societies should be resilient, cities should be resilient, individuals should be resilient, etc. In safety research, the topic of resilience has also gained momentum in the past decade in particular through the thrust of authors in cognitive and system safety engineering [4].

The central idea of resilience derives from first, a deconstruction of the notion of human error, second, a better appreciation of the expertise of front-line operators (their abilities to cope with complexity) and third, a systemic view of safety, aggregating individual trade-offs to infer behaviour of complex systems. Resilience engineering is therefore an approach and practice which looks positively into people’s expertise when facing daily trade-offs, and which aims to combine the aggregated effects of these behaviours at a system level to anticipate their consequences. It shares, with other research traditions, such as high reliability organisations, this methodological perspective which consists in studying the daily operations of high-risk systems and critical infrastructures (rather than focusing solely on disasters [6]). And, both these traditions face the problem of studying safety from a multi-level research.

2.2 Challenges of Multilevel Research

Why undertake multilevel research? Thirty years of research argues for the importance of this methodological problem, as for instance when conceptualising evolution of research topics from technical, human then organisational lenses [7]. If the topic is the prevention of major disruption in safety-critical systems, such as disaster caused by nuclear power plant, aircraft crash or toxic chemicals release, research strategies have to be based on interdisciplinary and multilevel principles.

Indeed, we know from reports (or experience of investigating major accidents [8]) that they are the products of strategic choices and leadership practices by top executives, organisational processes, structures and management, teams and operational actors, regulatory and inspectorate dynamics, material and sociocognitive properties as well as engineering/technological aspects [9, 10].

From these reports, we know that accidents can’t be reduced, for instance, to front-line operators’ activities. Focusing on their work in daily operations fails to

2 Resilience, Reliability, Safety: Multilevel Research Challenges 9 provide the broad picture needed for understanding the construction of safety at the scale of what is revealed in retrospect in major events. Engineering design and maintenance of installations are as important, as well as the strategy of companies and its implications for daily operations but also the inspection practices of control authorities.

But each of these topics or areas of investigation (e.g., regulatory practices, company strategy, control rooms operations, technological design) is studied separately through different field of expertise, and it remains, to this date, that an in-depth investigation best illustrates, in hindsight, a multilevel research strategy and the need to consider industrial safety from a broad angle [11]. In fact, what we know of disasters with the help of these exceptional investigations is not, or rarely, matched by studies of daily operations from this multilevel perspective. There are at least three reasons for this, which turn into specific challenges.

Firstly, the resources spent to find out what happened in the aftermath of a disaster allow the collection of a vast amount of data which is not very often available otherwise in daily contexts. In these exceptional circumstances, states are often empowered to proceed with in-depth investigations, to access a diversity of findings and actors, including top actors of multinationals and agencies. Secondly, through the hiring of many consultants, practitioners and academics, such investigations can rely on expertise in a range of scientific disciplines (e.g. engineering, social sciences) in order to make sense, from a diversity of angles, of the engineering and social dimensions of the event. A true interdisciplinary strategy is often applied in this context [12].

But there is a third reason. It is much easier in retrospect to link a diversity of decisions and practices of operators, engineers, managers and regulators and to consider how they occur in relation to organisational structures, cultures and power issues which combine into specific circumstances of technological and artefacts for the accident to happen the way it happened. This problem has been defined as the hindsight bias by psychologists or retrospective fallacy by sociologists or historians.

So a multilevel safety research strategy faces at least three difficulties:

. Time, resources and broad access to data and actors;

. Ability to use and associate a wide range of scientific expertise;

3. A clear link between technological potential failures and multiple decisions, including top management and regulators.

Noe

These difficulties can be turned into several challenges: cognitive, institutional, methodological, theoretical and empirical.

Cognitive and institutional challenges. Rasmussen, a researcher who shaped the background for the development of resilience engineering, the conceptualisation of a multilevel safety research was precisely the intention of this researcher during the 1990s, something captured graphically by his famous sociotechnical view along with the idea of an envelope of safety [13]. But, although he was at the origin of the intellectual agenda of resilience engineering which developed subsequently, this most demanding research strategy has only been little pursued theoretically or empirically, in relation to difficulty (2) above. Rasmussen anticipated it. “Complex,

10 J.-C. Le Coze cross-disciplinary issues, by nature, require an extended time horizon. It takes considerable time to be familiar with the paradigms of other disciplines and often time consuming field studies are required” [13]. I have described this as Rasmussen’s strong program for a hard problem [14].

Studying safety across levels of a sociotechnological system was at the heart of this program and requires interdisciplinarity [14]. It is a cognitive challenge as indicated in the quote first because researchers tempted by multilevel research must become familiar with a range of domains and research traditions. It is an institutional challenge because universities favour disciplinary perspectives. “Such studies, quite naturally, are less tempting for young professors who have to present a significant volume of publications within few years to ensure tenure” [13].

Methodological, theoretical and empirical challenges. But there are other methodological, theoretical and empirical challenges associated that Rasmussen did not discuss in his time, especially difficulties (1) and (3). A first challenge when studying daily operations is what, who, how, when and for how long to observe, meet and connect a very wide range of category of natural events, artefacts and actors creating these complex and highly dynamic networks [10]. There is a diversity of them which contribute to the safe performance of a sociotechnological system.

Based on my experience of the chemical industry, this can potentially concern, depending on the location and size of the plant and organisation, a rather high number of differentiated natural phenomena, objects and individuals ranging from heat, cold, wind, fog, valves, pipes, chemical products to procedures, screens but also software coupled with the activities of front-line operators, site managers, corporate actors and control authorities as well as subcontracting companies including consulting ones (e.g., engineering, management). And it is the nature and quality of their interactions which produces a certain level of safety.

It is precisely through these interactions that safety is constructed on a daily basis, what is crucial is therefore to understand the results of their interactions, which represent therefore a tremendous number of them. For instance, when concentrating on human actors, all of them have a contribution at different levels, whether when participating as a safety engineer to the design phase of a project (e.g., anticipating hazardous scenario), when deactivating as an operator an alarm in a control room or when managing a team as the head of a safety department. The vast amount of interactions between these actors in their natural/atmospheric, software and material environment represents the basis of the daily construction of safety. The aggregated results of these interactions are daunting to anyone interested in the study of safety from a multilevel perspective.

It is clear that only prolonged periods of time can allow an external observer to get to appreciate these complexities, but also to make sense of them... Rain, cold weather, heat, storms, valves, chemicals, texts, diagrams, screens, formulas, tools, procedures, logs, reports, symbols, practices, operators, safety or maintenance engineers, production or site managers, actors of unions, CEO, control authority inspectors, etc. It is this mix of material and social networks which ensures reliability, resilience or safety.

2 Resilience, Reliability, Safety: Multilevel Research Challenges 11

This creates methodological challenges which are financial (funds available for prolonged fieldwork) and access to data combined with legal issues (especially when it comes to top decision makers). Another one is whether such an approach should be implemented by one or several researchers, one problem being to coordinate points of views when multiplying expertise and researchers.

When one can pay attention to this diversity of interconnected and distributed artefacts, objects, individuals and contexts whether climatic or institutional, one is baffled by the ability of these “ecosociotechnical” networks to remain within the boundary of safety performance given the infinite number of adaptations produced in real time and the associated flows of decisions taken. This is precisely why the solution from a research point of view is often to focus on one aspect of the problem, say, the study of process operators’ interactions in a control room, the study of a maintenance team and service interactions, the study of leadership of the management of a department or the study of a chemical reaction. And, it is particularly convenient because it is precisely how some disciplines have established themselves, namely by specialising in certain themes corresponding to a degree of description of phenomena. The problem becomes one of relationship between parts and whole when involved in a multilevel study.

How to grasp the whole when one has only tools and concept for looking into parts? If one can look into the interactions of a team at the shop floor level, the conditions under which they produce their expert tradeoffs on a daily basis are products of organisational features, engineering design and strategic orientations of companies. There is therefore a need to look into the interactions of a lot of actors in the way they combine to shape these interactions. Because it is impossible to look at everything, choices must be made of who, when, where and how to look and to probe, then access to observations and interviews must be granted (which is much easier when it comes to process operators than to executives!), so the methodological challenge is also tightly connected to a theoretical one.

When one is potentially granted access to a very wide range of situations as described above, how to organise the material collected to interpret findings in relation to the topic of safety? The problem is that the amount of data produced is potentially huge and an intellectual background for organising these data is needed, which leads to the question of the availability of a model (or several) to do this. Because there are many different angles of observations related to different domains of knowledge, the model supporting the links between them is one crucial aspect which is a theoretical challenge. Graphical models have been key to help frame this complex issue [6, 9], but they can only help structure our mindset, and analytical developments are also needed. Moreover, sometimes, areas of great interest for safety are also not investigated. One example is the field of strategy decision making, for which one needs to produce specific research to better approach this important dimension from an empirical point of view.

Finally, another challenge is to deal with trends of our contemporary world of globalised activities with intense and uncertain market competitions (Sect.2.1 above). The current operating conditions as introduced in the first section create difficulties for any research, first because organisations are not stabilised and are likely to

12 J.-C. Le Coze

Cognitive challenge: knowing then combining independently developed conceptual schemes from different research traditions.

Institutional challenge: overcoming disciplinary boundaries established through institutions (universities, journals).

Methodological challenge: observing and accessing a very wide diversity of artefacts and actors shaping the conditions of safe operations within a sufficient amount of time.

Theoretical challenge: selecting, ordering and interpreting a vast amount of data in a way that is consistent with the object of study, safety, while combining different insights.

Empirical challenge: facing globalised contexts of extended chains of commodities, speed of multifaceted changes related to competitive markets and trends affecting reliability, resilience or safety of operations.

Fig. 2.1 Short description of challenges of multilevel safety research evolve quickly (which can restrict the validity of interpretations to a limited period of time), second, because many organisations are now part of worldwide networks and information infrastructures which connect actors from multiple locations over the world, and in multiple entities. This last point also indicates the problem of understanding local realities with a view of the macro trends affecting the constraints of safety critical systems, such as standardisation, outsourcing or financialisation, to select a few of the trends of the past decades associated with globalised processes [15]. This in an area where research is needed too.

Multiple challenges of multilevel safety research. The table summarises the challenges of a multilevel safety research as briefly (more can be found in [16]) addressed in this chapter and which derives from three difficulties: time and data access (1), interdisciplinarity (2) and link between potential failures and decisions (3). These difficulties are decomposed in cognitive, institutional, methodological, empirical and theoretical challenges summarized in Fig. 2.1.

Resilience is a notion resonating with the current moment of history where surprises of different kinds have become part of our expectations, requiring the ability to both anticipate and react in a timely manner for a diversity of situations, including, among other, extreme natural events, terrorism, technology breakdown or financial disturbances. This contemporary situation requires from safety-critical systems an ability to adapt to uncertain and potentially fast changing environments. Resilience engineering addresses this topic, as other research traditions, such as high reliability organisations, both facing the problem of multilevel research of the complex, networked, globalised and constructed nature of safety. When following such a multilevel strategy, researchers meet cognitive, institutional, methodological, theoretical and empirical challenges.

2 Resilience, Reliability, Safety: Multilevel Research Challenges 13

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4. E. Hollnagel, D.D. Woods, N. Leveson (eds.), Resilience Engineering: Concepts and Precepts (Ashgate, Aldershot, 2006)