#118 – Resilience Engineering, Safety Differently & Synesis

#118 – Resilience Engineering, Safety Differently & Synesis

From Anesthesia Guidebook by Jon Lowrance

April 20, 2025 · 30 min

About this episode

This episode discusses resilience engineering and safety differently in the context of healthcare teams and organizational development.

This is Part 2 of a 3 part series on organizational development – how we work and live together as teams in healthcare so we can do our best work, master our craft, take amazing care of patients and actually enjoy the work we do. (no big deal) In the first part ( Episode 117 ), we talked about systems thinking and patterns of high reliability organizations (HROs). Systems thinking helps us zoom out to consider the complexity of situations and the various levers that influence outcomes. High reliability organizations adopt specific systems thinking practices to achieve consistent success in safety-critical, complex environments. Resilience engineering builds on systems thinking and HRO theory by teaching us how to develop adaptive capacity, build for success (not just avoiding error) and bounce back when things don’t go well. Safety differently is about seeing safety as not the absence of mistakes and errors but the capacity for the right thing to happen. It also recasts the worker not as the weak link in a complex system (the point of failure), but as the source of resilience and capacity. Front-line healthcare workers – you and me – are often the ones who find the…

People in this episode

Host: Jon Lowrance

Topics covered

  • resilience engineering
  • safety differently
  • organizational development
  • healthcare teams
  • systems thinking
  • high reliability organizations

Keywords

  • resilience engineering
  • safety differently
  • high reliability organizations
  • systems thinking
  • healthcare

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