Resilience Engineering

Epilogue: Resilience Engineering Precepts

Erik Hollnagel

David D. Woods

Safety is Not a System Property

One of the recurrent themes of this book is that safety is something a system or an organisation does, rather than something a system or an organisation has. In other words, it is not a system property that, once having been put in place, will remain. It is rather a characteristic of how a system performs. This creates the dilemma that safety is shown more by the absence of certain events – namely accidents – than by the presence of something. Indeed, the occurrence of an unwanted event need not mean that safety as such has failed, but could equally well be due to the fact that safety is never complete or absolute.

In consequence of this, resilience ...