Building and revising adaptive capacity sharing for technical incident response: A case of resilience engineering

We report an organization's method for recruiting additional, specialized human resources during anomaly handling. The method has been tailored to encourage sharing adaptive capacity across organizational units. As predicted by Woods' theory, this case shows that sharing adaptive capacity allows graceful extensibility that is particularly useful when a system is challenged by frequent but unpredictably severe events. We propose that (1) the ability to borrow adaptive capacity from other units is a hallmark of resilient systems and (2) the deliberate adjustment adaptive capacity sharing is a feature of some forms of resilience engineering. Some features of this domain that may lead to discovery of resilience and promote resilience engineering in other settings, notably hospital emergency rooms.