Resilience is an integrative concept that appeared in 21st century scientific thinking and encompasses two main ideas: response to stressful events and sustainability of systems in coping with stressful events (Reich et al., 2010). There is no consensus on a common definition of system resilience. Resilience is sometimes considered as a process, as a characteristic of system, as a dynamic of development, as an outcome and sometimes all of the above (Zautra et al. 2010). To be resilient, a system has to be exposed to significant threats or severe adversity and achieve a successful adaptation despite negative conditions (Luthar et al. 2000). Resilience related definitions, models and artifacts vary according to the diversity and the complexity of systems (technological devices, individuals, groups, work situations, organizations, communities, states, territories, etc.), of threats (natural, technological, entropic, economical, anticipated, surprise, etc.) and of adaptation modes (routines, compliance to rules, improvisation, return to a stable state, transformation, etc.).
Theories of Resilience has been developed with perspectives of improving safety performance and safety management systems in management sciences (Wildavsky 1988, Weick 1998, Weick et Sutcliffe 2007), in safety sciences (Hollnagel et all 2006, 2011) and in disaster and crisis management sciences (Confort et all. 2010). Some works on the definition of resilience are related to specific capacities: “capacity to cope with unanticipated dangers” (Wildavsky 1988), “capacity to improvise”, to “bounce back” (Weick 1998), “monitoring the boundary conditions of the current model for competence and adjusting or expanding that model to better accommodate changing demands” (Woods 2006), whereas other works aim to integrate all capacities required to be safe: “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” (Hollnagel et all. 2011).
The aim of the proposed paper is to describe a framework for assessing and improving socio-technical system resilience. The framework is the result of an ongoing process aiming to develop methods and tools based on Resilience Engineering concepts and models. Framework presented is the result of the refinement of an initial method based on the Resilience Analysis Grid (Hollnagel 2011) and presenting some limitations identified after an initial experimentation.
