How I Understand Resilience Engineering

Resilience engineering has a working definition that I'm fine with adopting. But I want to get a bit more into what exactly resilience engineering is creating, if engineering is an act of creation.

Woods says that resilience is a verb. It's something that is done, or as I like to say, people "perform" resilience. This makes it an action, not an attribute. Someone can't say that a person "has resilience," but one could say that that person "does resilience."

And what is "doing resilience" exactly? We know from the literature it's anticipating, diagnosing, cross-checking, exapting, etc. Now how does a person or a system do those things?

Well, they tap into "adaptive capacity." And what is adaptive capacity? It seems to me that resilience engineering is the creation and modulation of adaptive capacity in particular circumstances.

But, like, what is adaptive capacity? I think it's potential. Like in a metaphysical sense. And so resilience engineering is the creation of new degrees of freedom, new avenues, for the actualization of potential.

What does "potential" mean? Here I draw upon one of my favorite philosophers, Gilbert Simondon, and his book Individuation in Light of Notions of Form and Information.

In that book, Simondon argues that a lot of previous philosophy and thinking generally has overlooked that reality has a dimension reserved for potential. Physics has an inkling of it in the idea of potential energy, but too often this is ignored or devalued and the empirically-perceivable actual is prized instead. Simondon argues that we should give potential pride of place because it's only through the actualization of potential that the actual comes to be what it is. Instead of finding what is and pretending it has no history, we need to start instead by asking how what is comes to be. Don't assume ontology; seek ontogenesis.

Resilience engineering, for me, studies that human potential and builds ways to maintain and modulate its actualization towards the satisfaction of human needs. To give an operative analogy, consider what "saturation" means. This is a term with a negative meaning in the field: reaching saturation means that the system seizes up and can no longer perform resilience. It's exhausted its resources and can no longer gracefully extend. This idea of exhaustion is important. I get the sense that many people think that reaching saturation is like filling a vessel: take a glass of water at sea level and room temperature and put salt in it. Eventually the water can no longer absorb the salt and crystals start to remain intact at the bottom, indicating that it's saturated.

I think that's precisely the wrong way to look at this because the water can in fact become supersaturated. That supersaturated state is achievable when the water is put in different conditions, like if it were heated above room temperature. In that case the water can absorb more salt than normal, and that excess remains as potential energy even if the heat source is removed and the water returns to room temperature; that metastable state is what makes crystallization possible. The process of crystallization is the return to saturation and the exhaustion of potential energy. The water becomes inert in a certain sense, unlike before when it had the excess energy.

To conclude this analogy, I think resilience engineering is like the creation, maintenance, and modulation of that state of system metastability so that people in systems can wield their energy in productive ways. When systems actualize all their potential and get back to saturation they get brittle and break. When that happens to people they burn out. Resilience engineering is the activity of counteracting that.