The Second Step: Surprise Is Inevitable. Now What?

The ontological underpinnings of resilience engineering focus on the experience of surprise as an inescapable component of existence in the complex adaptive universe (Woods & Hollnagel, 2006). The resource limitations of all systems (especially cognitive systems) force the units of those systems (agents) to create and rely on models of the world. These models are necessary and necessarily incomplete – they are simplifications of the world on which they are based. Because they are simplifications, there will be inaccuracies in their predictive power; this will lead the agents – users of the models – to experience surprise (Woods & Hollnagel, 2006). Although past attempts to produce thorough and exhaustive lists of all potential outcomes (robustness exercises) have produced significant results in controlled settings or where large recourse endowments are available, the benefits of those techniques are architecturally resource-limited by the mitigative mechanisms which field the creativity of the practitioners devising the scenarios. Such attempts to “outthink” the universe by defining each potential specific instance are necessarily limited in their ultimate operational effectiveness. Consequently, capacities to deal with the inevitable surprises must be developed and maintained when and where the work is done.