The Resilience Analysis Grid (RAG)

Resilience is defined by the system’s ability to adjust the way things are done. It is therefore a characteristic or quality of performance, rather than a characteristic or quality (or quantity) of a system or an organisation per se. From the very beginning, resilience engineering emphasis that resilience is something a system does, and not something that a system has.

As soon as the idea of resilience engineering started to spread, questions were asked about how one could measure resilience. It almost seems as if something cannot exist unless it can be measured. (Or as Lord Kelvin said "To measure is to know.") Because resilience refers to a quality rather than a quantity, to something that the system does rather than to something that the system has, it follows that a measure of resilience must be different from the traditional measures of, e.g., safety. On the one hand, resilience cannot be represented by a single or simple measurement (because there is no single or simple quality of resilience). On the other hand it is quite legitimate to want to 'measure' resilience, since it otherwise is impossible to engineer, manage, or develop it.

The chosen solution is to consider the four capabilities that together define resilience, and from that basis develop a Resilience Analysis Grid, i.e., four sets of questions where the answers can be used to construct a resilience profile. Each of the four abilities can easily be investigated by looking at the details of how they are - or should be - implemented in a system or an organisation. And answers to these detailed questions provide a good starting point for proposing concrete ways of change or improvement - while keeping in mind, of course, that none of the abilities are independent of the others.

The RAG has been described in the Epilogue of Resilience Engineering in Practice. A more detailed version can be found here. The RAG has been used in practice in several industries, and has also been included in the Holistic Guidelines of the Australian Radiation Protection and Nuclear Safety Agency.