Organising Resilience

This book has sought to answer a practical and specific set of questions: how do airline flight safety investigators interpret incidents, identify risks and improve safety? Answering these questions requires understanding the practical theories that shape how investigators think, along with the situated practices through which they interpret and act. Flight safety investigators represent a particular type of risk manager: one that works at the heart of safety management systems that are designed to capture moments of organisational risk and transform these into sources of improvement and resilience. Understanding the practices of flight safety investigators lifts the lid on the challenging and complex world of airline safety management, a world in which knowledge and control are amongst the most valued and highly prized attributes of organisational performance. Picking apart these practices also offers deeper and broader insights into the practical work of risk management, the nature of safety and resilience in complex sociotechnical systems, and the role of incidents, errors and close calls in both manufacturing and managing risk — issues which this chapter turns to shortly.