Integrated safety management based on organizational resilience

The paper addresses how measures of resilience (engineering) can be added to the existing portfolio of principles and practices of safety management. Resilience (engineering) is not just advances in applied methodology, but another approach based on different assumptions and a radically different system model. Hence, the integration of resilience into the safety management portfolio will also have implications for existing principles and practices. In order to investigate this, the paper addresses issues related to complexity, sensemaking, and emergence. In this very generic sense, complexity signifies a tendency to produce unintended effects and emergent (novel) patterns as an inherent property of normal state of affairs. In everyday as well as scientific parlance, “complex” is however rather often used as an amplified or accentuated expression of “complicated” or “difficult”, apparently without bearing any distinctive meaning other than being way beyond trivial to resolve and manage. Accordingly, the notion of “complex challenges” seems to be an everyday mantra for political as well as business leaders in order to signify an extraordinary capability of the messenger. On the other hand, over the past decades we have witnessed several waves of complexity theory orientations, constituting a plethora of more or less scientific literature that posits complexity as some esoteric and systemic secret that circumvents almost all prevalent and common sense based on apparently linear (uni-directional) causality. A brief look behind the everyday, the powertalk, the euphoric and even the dictionary meaning of complexity is thus needed in order to discuss the relation between complexity and resilience, as well as its implications for risk, safety and its management. 2.1 Complexity and emergence The link between (the terms) complexity and resilience pervades recent literature on resilience in general, and Resilience Engineering in particular (e.g., Hollnagel et al. 2006, Hollnagel et al. 2008, Nemeth et al. 2009, Hollnagel et al. 2011). Although this literature reflects a variety of conceptions of intractable complexity and its