p.1 Not being able to control events, I control myself; and I adapt myself to them, if they do not adapt
themselves to me.
Michel de Montaigne (1533-1592), French essayist.
p.1 Resilience Engineering (RE) (Hollnagel et al., 2006) focuses on the ability of an organization
to cope with, and recover from, unexpected developments.
p.2 [Resilience Engineering] can be used to assess and enhance the ability of an organization to
adapt in order to meet challenges... [Resilience Engineering] seeks to create and maintain systems that can
cope with and adapt to complex, dynamic, and changing environments. [Resilience Engineering] acknowledges the inability
to specify all possible threats and responses. Instead, it provides methods and tools to manage safety and productivity.
p.2 Being able to adjust to different conditions or environments sounds like a desirable trait.
p.8 Many features of tasks such as continuous, simultaneous, and dynamic [elements] are challenging to manage
cognitively... resilience is substantially about dynamic, not static, properties. New thinking along the
lines of resilience requires new kinds of language to describe system properties.
Resilience anticipates future possibilities rather than simply repeating past performance.
The future that resilience anticipates is not clearly and well defined, but is instead uncertain and poorly defined.
p.39 An organization's resilience capacity captures its ability to take situation-specific, robust,
and transformative actions when confronted with unexpected and powerful events that have the potential to jeopardize an organization's
long-term survival. Strategic agility is a complex, varied construct that can take multiple forms but captures an
organization's ability to develop and quickly apply flexible, nimble, and dynamic capabilities.
p.39 In this chapter, we explain why organizational resilience capacity can be viewed as an antecedent
to strategic agility, and as a moderator of the relationship between a firm's dynamic activities and subsequent performance.
p.41 Resilience capacity is embedded in a set of organizational routines and processes by which a firm conceptually
orients itself, acts decisively to move forward, and establishes a setting of diversity and adjustable integration that enables
it to overcome the potentially debilitating consequences of a disruptive shock (Lengnick-Hall and Beck, 2005). We
define resilience capacity as the organizational ability and confidence to act decisively and effectively in response to conditions
that are uncertain, surprising, and sufficiently disruptive that they have the potential to jeopardize long-term
survival. Resilience capacity is associated with an ability to solve current problems while preserving flexibility.
p.41 Strategic agility has been defined as "the ability to quickly recognize and seize opportunities,
change direction, and avoid collisions" (McCann, 2004: 47)
p.46-47 behavioural resilience results from a dynamic tension between behaviours that foster creativity
and unconventional actions, and familiar and well-rehearsed routines that keep an organization grounded and to provide
the platform for inventiveness. Combined, these behaviours create centrifugal forces
(influences that make ideas, knowledge and information available for creative action) and centripetal forces
(influences that direct inputs and processes toward actionable solutions) that enable a firm to learn more about a
situation and to fully use its own resources under conditions that are uncertain and surprising (Sheremata, 2000).
p.47 Learned resourcefulness is the accumulation of established and practiced behaviours for innovative
problem-solving that result in heightened levels of ingenuity, inventiveness, and bricolage (the
imaginative use of materials for previously unintended purposes).
p.47 Organizations that develop and rehearse behavioural routines that promote resourcefulness and
creativity are able to take whatever resources and opportunities are at hand to move the firm forward. Coutu (2002)
described these behaviours as "ritualized ingenuity."
p.117 A resilient system is able to adjust its functioning prior to, during, or following changes
and disturbances, so that it can continue to perform as required after a disruption or a major mishap, and in the presence
of continuous stresses. The key term of this definition is the ability of a system to adjust its functioning.
p.119 Going further into the proposed definition of resilience, a second key phrase is
that the system must be able to adjust its functioning prior to, during, or following changes
and disturbances.
p.122 The detection that something has happened is not entirely passive but depends on what the system looks
for - on what its pre-defined categories of critical events or threats are.
p.124 The ability to address the actual depends on whether threats or events can be imagined,
whether it is possible to prepare a response, and whether it is cost-effective to do so.. it is clear that
such readiness is only feasible for regular threats... it is in practice only possible for a system to be ready to respond
to the regular threats, or even just to some of them. It is nevertheless a potential risk if the readiness to respond is limited
to a small number of events or conditions.
p.124-125 Monitoring normally looks for certain conditions or relies on certain indicators.
These are by definition called leading indicators, because they indicate what may happen before it happens.
p.125 According to the proposed definition, resilience is the ability of a system to effectively
adjust its functioning prior to an event. As argued above, this can only be done if attention is paid to that which may become
critical in the short term.
p.130-132 If a resilient system is to be able to pay attention to the actual, the critical, the
potential, and the factual, an obvious question is how this can be brought about. This is really the question of
how resilience can be engineered... In order to address the actual, in order to know what to do, a system must have
a clearly defined set of events to which it is ready to respond... In order to address the critical, in order to
know what to look for, the most important thing is a set of valid and reliable indicators... In looking at the potential,
in looking towards the future, the most important issue is probably what the model of the future is... Finally, in looking
at the factual, in trying to learn from the past, it is important to learn from successes as well as from failures.
p.240 Representations of data that simultaneously show both constraints and possible solutions for
dealing with those constraints are crucial to orient and re-orient clinicians. [JLJ from Nemeth, 2007, Healthcare
IT as a Source of Resilience]
