An overview of agility and resilience: From crisis management to aviation

The concepts of agility and resilience both focus on the management of complex safety- and security-critical operations in terms of adaptability of operations in the face of change and unforeseen circumstances. After providing an overview of key concepts associated to resilience and agility from Resilience Engineering (RE), disaster management, crisis management and military command and control (C2) perspectives, this paper identifies research tensions, opportunities for cross-over of research foci, and challenges for the successful practical application of both agility and resilience. Resilience from the military C2 agility perspective seems to be mostly related to rebound or recovery, and is thus a distinctly different from how resilience is used in RE and disaster management. The other enablers (responsiveness, versatility, flexibility, innovativeness,adaptability) of agility and C2 agility, and the resilience perspectives of graceful extensibility and sustained adaptability, seem promising for innovation in aviation, pointing research to organizational and design principles to support adaptation and cope with surprise. Associated research questions applied to aviation are exemplified.