Resilience is often described as the ability to “bounce back,” but in high-hazard industries, resilience is something far more deliberate: the organizational capacity to anticipate, adapt, respond, and learn. Across my career — from petrochemical plants in the U.S. to manufacturing sites in China and Argentina to mentoring young engineers in Japan and Colombia — I have seen a consistent truth: systems rarely fail suddenly. They fail gradually, through small variances, unchallenged assumptions, and weak signals that are discounted until the consequences can no longer be ignored. The organizations that thrive are the ones that treat resilience as a load-bearing structure, not a slogan.
NASA’s history offers some of the clearest lessons on what happens when the foundational principles of safety begin to erode. Challenger, Columbia, and the 2024–2025 Starliner crewed flight test were separated by decades, technologies, and teams, yet the organizational patterns were strikingly similar. Variances replaced disciplined operations, weak signals were visible but discounted, leadership framing distorted risk perception, and organizational drift accumulated until failure became inevitable.
What the Challenger tragedy taught us
In the Challenger tragedy, repeated O-ring erosion was normalized. In Columbia, foam strike risks were minimized and imagery requests denied because leaders believed the shuttle was “safe enough.” And in the Starliner mishap, qualification gaps, schedule pressure, and delayed recognition of a propulsion system failure left two astronauts stranded on the International Space Station (ISS) for 286 days. These were not just technical failures; they were failures that reveal what happens when organizations lose sight of the fundamentals that keep people safe.
Non-negotiable principles for a resilient process safety culture
Every resilient process safety culture rests on non-negotiable principles: transparency, honesty, trust, and disciplined operations, among others. Procedures can fail. Systems can drift. But principles — when they are lived — keep people aligned and safe. Early in my career, I visited a facility where a supervisor told me, “We don’t have time to worry about what might happen — we have production to run.” His mindset didn’t cause an incident that day, but it created the conditions for one. When principles weaken, drift accelerates, and the organization becomes blind to the very signals that could prevent catastrophe.
Clear sight
Clear sight is the next essential element of resilience. Weak signals, near misses, and anomalies are not noise — they are data. But people will only speak up if the culture allows it. Several years ago, while conducting a maturity assessment in India, I watched a young operator quietly point out a small inconsistency in a routine reading. It would have been easy to dismiss. Instead, the supervisor paused, listened, and asked clarifying questions. That moment of curiosity prevented a much larger issue. Clear sight is built one conversation at a time, and it requires leaders to challenge their own assumptions. When leaders assume things are fine, the organization filters out anything that contradicts that belief.
Resilience also depends on how an organization learns — before, during, and after events. We implement corrective actions, but we don’t always verify whether they improved the system.
Leadership behaviors ultimately determine whether these principles, practices, and learning loops take root. Across industries and continents, I’ve seen resilient leaders consistently model curiosity, create clarity, and build trust through consistency. They reward early reporting, they reinforce disciplined operations, and they understand that safety and production are interdependent priorities. A leadership moment that has stayed with me came from a plant manager who paused a meeting and said, “If someone sees something that doesn’t look right, I want to hear it — even if it slows us down.” That single sentence changed the room. People sat up, they spoke up, and the culture shifted.
Measuring what truly matters
Measuring what truly matters is another essential component of resilience. Organizations must look beyond lagging indicators and examine the health of critical safeguards, the frequency and quality of weak signal reporting, the strength of learning loops, and the alignment between leadership intent and frontline experience. Metrics should sharpen sight — not distort it. When metrics become targets, they lose their value. But when they illuminate reality, they become powerful tools for resilience.
No single tool can provide this clarity. Audits, maturity models, perception tools, climate surveys, objective indicators, digital platforms, and frontline tools each offer a different lens. The key is using the right tool for the right question and combining them to see the whole system. In my work with organizations around the world, the most resilient ones are those that triangulate across multiple sources of insight rather than relying on a single measure of “culture.”
NASA’s history shows us what happens when principles erode. Our work is to ensure they don’t. Resilience is not a destination. It is a capability we build, practice, and strengthen over time. The organizations that succeed are the ones that maintain clear sight, learn continuously, model disciplined leadership, measure what matters, and hold fast to the principles that keep people safe — especially when pressure mounts.
This article originally appeared in the Spotlight on Safety column in the June 2026 issue of CEP. Members have access online to complete issues, including a vast, searchable archive of back issues found at www.aiche.org/cep. Learn more about AIChE membership.
