Erik Hollnagel, David D. Woods and Nancy Leveson (editors)
Explores groundbreaking new development in safety and risk management, where 'success' is based on the ability of organizations, groups and individuals to anticipate the changing shape of risk before failures and harm occur. Featuring contributions from many of the worlds leading figures in the fields of human factors and safety, Resilience Engineering provides provocative insights into system safety.
James Reason:
'This is the most thought-provoking collection of papers I've read in a very long time. They are written by the best in the field at the top of their form. Resilience is a notion whose time has come. We cannot realistically expect to eliminate adverse events and still stay in business. But we can strive to achieve greater robustness towards our operational hazards. This book tells us how to do it and why it's necessary.'
Teaching Cognitive Engineering?
A new resource is:
Joint Cognitive Systems: Patterns in Cognitive Systems Engineering
Abstract from JCS: Patterns...
New technologies are fascinating, we thought, because more powerful automation would overcome human limitations and make our systems ‘faster, better, cheaper’ with simple easy tasks for people. Be prepared to be surprised—what you thought you knew about new technology and more powerful automation is not what happens. Research in Cognitive Systems Engineering (CSE) looks at the intersection of people, technology and work. What it has found is not stories of simplification through more automation, rather it has found stories of complexity and adaptation. When work changed through new technology, the real result was practitioners now had to cope with new complexities and tighter constraints. They adapted their strategies and the artifacts to workaround difficulties and accomplish their goals as responsible agents. The surprise was that new powers had transformed work creating new roles, new decisions and new vulnerabilities. Ironically, more autonomous machines have created the requirement for more sophisticated forms of coordination across people and across people and machines to adapt to new demands and pressures.
This book synthesizes these Patterns though stories about coordination and mis-coordination, resilience and brittleness, affordance and clumsiness in a variety of settings, from a hospital intensive care unit, to a nuclear power control room, to a space shuttle control center. The stories reveal demands that make work difficult, how people at work adapt but get trapped by complexity, how people at a distance from work oversimplify the complexities and squeeze practitioners. The book tells the story of how CSE observes at intersection of people, technology and work, how CSE abstracts patterns behind the surface details and wide variations, and how CSE discovers promising new directions to help people cope with complexities. The stories of CSE show one key to well-adapted work is the ability to avoid getting stuck and to be ready to revise—being prepared to be surprised.