David Woods has a great series of free online lectures on resilience engineering. After watching those lectures, a lot of the material clicked for me in a way that it never really did from reading his papers.
Woods writes about systems at a very general level: the principles he describes could apply to cells, organs, organisms, individuals, teams, departments, companies, ecosystems, socio-technical systems, pretty much anything you could describe using the word “system”. This generality means that he often uses abstract concepts, which apply to all such systems. For example, Woods talks about units of adaptive behavior, competence envelopes, and florescence. Abstractions that apply in a wide variety of contexts are very powerful, but reading about them is often tough going (cf. category theory).
In the short course lectures, Woods really brings these concepts to life. He’s an animated speaker (especially when you watch him at 2X speed). It’s about twenty hours of lectures, and he packs a lot of concepts into those twenty hours.
I made an effort to take notes as I watched the lectures. I’ve posted my notes to GitHub. But, really, you should watch the videos yourself. It’s the best way to get an overview about what resilience engineering is all about.
