David Woods - the science of resilience, graceful extensibility, and facilitating insight
Few concepts are more important to our society than resilience. Agnostic of domain, of nation, culture, and scale (as vital, indeed, to the individual life as to the planetary civilization), it would be impossible to overstate the pressure on us to understand it. If resilience is a core competency of our time, it would not be hyperbole to say that Dr. David Woods one of our most important thinkers.
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Dr. David Woods is Professor of Cognitive Systems Engineering and Human Systems Integration at Ohio State University. For 40 years David has worked to improve the safety of complex, high-risk systems in fields such as critical care medicine, aviation, space missions, intelligence analysis, and crisis management, along the way defining in clear terms the science of resilience and how it is practically applied.
His career includes multiple accident investigations, including the partial nuclear meltdown at Three Mile Island in 1979 and the Columbia Space Shuttle tragedy in 2003. His work illuminates principles of how people cope with complexity in time pressured situations and designs new systems to help people find meaning in large data fields when they are under pressure to diagnose anomalies and re-plan activities.
He is a founding researcher in the fields of cognitive systems engineering and resilience engineering as approaches to risk understanding and safety in complex systems.
He is author or editor of eight books including Behind Human Error, Resilience Engineering, and Resilience Engineering in Practice.
Lately, he has been exploring resilience in the context of organizations, studying safety concerns models and measures of the adaptive capacities of organizations to determine how they are resilient and if they are becoming too brittle in the face of change.
His career has earned him deserved honors and awards across the gamut of science and engineering's most illustrious bodies, far too many to list here.
David holds an MS and a doctorate in cognitive psychology from Purdue, focusing on human perception and attention.
To study and learn from David Woods is a masterclass in resilience thinking, a literacy demanded of all of us by the complex world we are walking into.