The ever-increasing speed of change in industry is challenging the safety practices in companies, especially in high-risk companies like in the chemical and oil industry and aviation. In order to adapt to the continuously increasing change in environmental conditions and the simultaneous change in organisation structures, human resources and processes, safety management practices have to be re-invented. The growing complexity of networks and technology introduces new, complex risks. Current safety practices and insights
are insufficient in coping with these issues. Resilience is needed for the further improvement of safety of high-risk processes. Resilient risk management addresses these risks by building more adaptive organizations. This strengthens business continuity through the synthesis of safety management processes
and the core business of companies. Resilience is the intrinsic ability of a system to adjust its functioning prior to, during, or following changes and disturbances, so that it can sustain required operations under both expected and unexpected conditions. The concept of resilience in itself is not new and was discovered as a general mechanism in biological systems responding to changes in the environment. The use of resilience in safety and risk management is relatively new. In organisations it facilitates the ability to adjust to a changing environment and strengthens risk management by improving its capabilities to respond to, monitor, learn from, and anticipate threats and opportunities. Concepts such as Tripod and the Bow-Tie deal with linear cause-effect relations, which may not give a good enough representation of how real life working conditions may lead to accidents. An important notion is that not every risk can be foreseen with respect to its genesis and impact. Even despite a low probability the precise moment of an event becoming reality cannot be predicted. Resilient risk management is therefore looking for answers to questions like how could we be smarter in defining and recognising weak signals, how could we detect a drift to danger, how do we get a better understanding of the reality of company
processes and their actual risk situation? It aims at developing organizational learning capabilities. By being able to dynamically respond to unforeseen events a resilient organizational system can adjust to changes and can return to a safe state after disturbances.
This seminar brings together renowned speakers to inform us about the latest knowledge on resilient risk management. The presentations will deal with an historic overview of the development of resilience, its impact on safety management practices, as well as a proposal for its implementation, and finally, an explanation of what the Resilience Innovation Lab intends to be for the safety community.
