Vigilance: a process contributing to the resilience of organizations

Ambre Brizon (1) , Jean-Luc Wybo (1)

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

From the analysis of emergency management activities, four main processes can be identified that contribute to the resilience of an organization facing a hazardous situation: Prevention, Protection, Learning and Vigilance. Vigilance is the ability of a system to detect and interpret weak signals and alerts. By doing so, it develops its anticipation capacities. We define two types of vigilance: individual and organizational. First one is required to run safely a system, but is difficult to set up. The second one permits to avoid crisis. After that we expose an organization of vigilance in three times: 1. Instantaneous danger, 2. Non instantaneous but known danger, 3. Unknown danger. But being vigilant requires access to information. We define three barriers that weaken vigilance: A contextual barrier, an interest (or routine) barrier and a communication barrier. Finally, we propose rules to promote a vigilant behavior and to organize vigilance in a system.

Mots clés: resilience; organization

Domaines: Gestion des risques et des crises

Ambre Brizon, Jean-Luc Wybo. Vigilance: a process contributing to the resilience of organizations. 2nd Symposium on Resilience Engineering, Nov 2006, Juan-les-Pins, France. 7 p. ⟨hal-00637881⟩