Resilience, Stability and Requisite Interpretation in Accident Investigations

The concept of ‘resilience’ is often absent in accident investigations, most likely because one of the central notions in resilience, ‘requisite imagination’, seems to be of limited utility when used in hindsight. In this paper we argue that requisite imagination is often a mirage, and that its false promise may well be based on treating stability and resilience as one unified concept. It is important to see the distinction between recommendations from accident investigations that aim at maintaining the ability to respond to known disturbances, (stability) and recommendations aimed at increasing the ability to cope with irregular and unexampled events (resilience). Instead of attempting to maximize resilience and stability at the same time, it may be more fruitful to try to balance these properties of a system. Thus, in accident investigation a safety perspective should include both traditional stabilityenhancing perspectives as well as a resilience perspective.