# Traditional versus resilience engineering views

- **期号**: SRE Weekly Issue #529（2026-08-10）
- **作者**: Lorin Hochstein
- **链接**: https://surfingcomplexity.blog/2026/08/02/traditional-versus-resilience-engineering-views/

## 简介

> I thought it would be a useful exercise to brainstorm some of the differences in focus between what I’ll call the traditional view of reliability, and the resilience engineering view.

It’s short (just a table), but it definitely made me think.

## 正文

As a fan of resilience engineering, I often differ with people on where we should focus our scarce engineering cycles in order to improve reliability.

I thought it would be a useful exercise to brainstorm some of the differences in focus between what I’ll call the *traditional* view of reliability, and the resilience engineering view.

| **Traditional view focuses on**  | **Resilience engineering view focuses on** | 
| accountability | coordination | 
| prioritization | goal conflicts | 
| risk mitigation | risk trade-offs | 
| better processes and conformance thereof | more expertise | 
| quantitative | qualitative | 
| root cause | interaction of multiple factors | 
| action items | insight | 
| preventing future incidents, ensuring all incidents are novel | better handling of novel incidents | 
| reducing complexity | navigating complexity | 
| objectives | production pressure | 
| robustness | resilience | 
| human variability as liability | human variability as asset | 
| building accurate system model | repairing inevitable model errors | 
| rigor | improvisation | 
| explicit knowledge | tacit knowledge | 
| automation, benefits of | automation, risks introduced by | 

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