Modelling the influence of safety management tools on resilience

Abstract

Descriptions of new safety management tools or suggestions for modifying existing tools on the basis of the principles of the Resilience Engineering paradigm are rare. This chapter introduces an evaluation checklist for adaptive safety management that can be used in analyzing the influence of safety management tools on resilience. Three commonly used safety management tools are inspected from the Resilience Engineering perspective to understand how they can be utilized for enhancing resilience in safety-critical organizations. The chapter concludes that the traditional tools of safety management focus heavily on constraining activity, but they do have a positive influence on the system’s general adaptive capacity. This effect is often unintentional, but the tools can also be used intentionally for this purpose, which requires becoming aware of both the direct and the indirect effects of the existing methods.