Conceptualising learning from resilient performance: A scoping literature review

Resilient performance is a crucial characteristic of complex socio-technical systems, enabling them to sustain essential functionality during changing or stressful conditions. Resilience Engineering (RE), a sub-field of safety research, focuses on this perspective of resilience. RE emphasises its “cornerstone model”, presenting the REsystem goals of “anticipating, monitoring, responding and learning”. The cornerstone of learning remains fragmented and undertheorized in the existing literature. This paper aims to enrich RE research and its practical implications by developing a nuanced and comprehensive understanding of the role of learning from resilient performance. To achieve this aim, a scoping literature review was conducted to assess how learning is conceptualised in the RE literature and the theoretical foundations on which previous work rests. The main findings show that RE researchers view learning as the process of understanding the system, sharing knowledge, and re-designing system properties. The application of established learning theories is limited. This paper contributes to research by proposing an organisational process for the RE cornerstone of learning, paving the way for deeper discussions in future studies about learning from resilient performance within complex sociotechnical systems.