As a fan of resilience engineering, I often differ with people on where we should focus our scarce engineering cycles in order to improve reliability.
I thought it would be a useful exercise to brainstorm some of the differences in focus between what I’ll call the traditional view of reliability, and the resilience engineering view.
| Traditional view focuses on | Resilience engineering view focuses on |
| accountability | coordination |
| prioritization | goal conflicts |
| risk mitigation | risk trade-offs |
| better processes and conformance thereof | more expertise |
| quantitative | qualitative |
| root cause | interaction of multiple factors |
| action items | insight |
| preventing future incidents, ensuring all incidents are novel | better handling of novel incidents |
| reducing complexity | navigating complexity |
| objectives | production pressure |
| robustness | resilience |
| human variability as liability | human variability as asset |
| building accurate system model | repairing inevitable model errors |
| rigor | improvisation |
| explicit knowledge | tacit knowledge |
| automation, benefits of | automation, risks introduced by |
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