From protection to resilience: Changing views on how to achieve safety

Erik Hollnagel (1)

1 CRC - Centre de recherche sur les Risques et les Crises

Effective safety management requires the ability to learn from the past and to anticipate the future. Yet what we can learn from the past (i.e., accident investigation) and what we can imagine for the future (i.e., risk assessment) depends critically on how we think about it, i.e., the models and methods we have at our disposal. Accident investigations have long been dominated by a search for causes, either as root causes or human errors. Risk assessment has similarly been dominated by static representations such as event and fault trees. In both cases the commonly used models and methods have reached their limits because the reality of our self-created socio-technical environments has become too complex. The alternative is to understand how the variability of human actions is a resource rather than a threat and to define safety as a system's resilience, its ability to adapt and adjust, rather than as the absence of adverse outcomes.

Mots clés: safety; resilence

Domaines: Gestion des risques et des crises

Erik Hollnagel. From protection to resilience: Changing views on how to achieve safety. 8th International Symposium of the Australian Aviation Psychology Association, Apr 2008, Sydney, Australia. 7 p. ⟨hal-00614256⟩