Once a system has been created it is necessary to monitor for internal and external change . Doing so makes it possible to recognize hazards that can lead to problems early enough to take action to address them . Monitoring may need to pick up on ‘ faint signals ’, early signals of problems in a process or project 35 . An organization that can anticipate may also be more successful in monitoring by paying more attention to signals .
Incident reporting is a systematic activity to monitor the state of resilience . The airline industry , for example , has mechanisms for pilots to report incidents ( which are not accidents , but which could result in accidents ). This enables learning to take place and allows lessons to be shared and action to be taken to prevent accidents .
A typical system model has a controller managing processes using a model of the processes to understand the outcomes based on feedback . This also is a form of monitoring the processes against the model . Digital twins should make such monitoring possible for a system , thus enabling the detection of potential issues before they become emergencies .
The following patterns 36 are useful for monitoring :
1 . Recognize that adaptive capacity is falling or inadequate to the contingencies and squeezes or bottlenecks ahead . This is related to the ability to monitor the environment and itself .
2 . Recognize the threat of exhausting buffers or reserves . This includes the fact that economic pressures drive organizations to become ‘ lean ’ and ‘ just in time ’ to the point that they may no longer be resilient . We are now seeing supply chain issues related to this .
3 . Recognize when to shift priorities across goal tradeoffs . Being able to sacrifice short term production goals in order to prioritize longer-term safety goals reflects the organization goals and culture .
4 . Make perspective shifts and contrast diverse perspectives that go beyond their nominal system position . The ability to change the organization itself and its approach is important to a resilience response , learning and anticipating .
5 . Navigate interdependencies across roles , activities , levels . The abilities of members of the organization to not work at cross-purposes or work purely locally is important to response and adaptation ( e . g . avoiding local optimizations that are harmful organizationally in the larger sense )
35
R Westrum , “ Faint Hearts and Faint Signals – How Organizations Manage Signs of Trouble .,” 1999 . quoted in Wreathall , “ Monitoring – A Critical Ability in Resilience Engineering .”
36
David D . Woods , “ Resilience and the Ability to Anticipate ,” in Resilience Engineering in Practice : A Guidebook .
Journal of Innovation 31