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Woods's short essay is the cleanest statement of what resilience engineering means by resilience, and the correction it presses is grammatical: resilience is a verb, not a property. A system is not resilient in the way it is red or heavy; resilience is something a system does, an ongoing activity of adapting to situations that fall outside the envelope its plans and procedures were built for. Woods distinguishes this sharply from robustness, which is the ability to handle a defined and anticipated set of disturbances (the redundancy, failovers and safety margins engineers design in advance); resilience is what is left to draw on when the disturbance is the one nobody designed for, and it lives in the adaptive capacity of the people and units at the sharp end. That capacity is future-oriented (resilience is a verb in the future tense, as Woods puts it): it is the readiness to recognise when the plan no longer fits and to stretch, extend or reconfigure what one is doing before the gap becomes a failure. Crucially it is neither free nor permanent; adaptive capacity is built, sustained, spent and lost, and organisations routinely trade it away in the name of efficiency, optimising for expected conditions until they have no slack left for the unexpected. For a corpus that resists the engineering-away of complexity, Woods supplies the operational vocabulary that sits between Holling's ecological resilience and everyday organisational life: it reframes safety, and psychological safety with it, as a capacity that has to be actively maintained rather than a state that can be achieved and locked in. Its limits are those of the form: it is a brief, deliberately abstract position piece written for a resource guide, rich in principle and light on procedure, so it tells you what to attend to without telling you in detail how to build the capacity it describes. (Text drawn from Woods, D.D. (2018) 'Resilience is a verb', in the IRGC Resource Guide on Resilience, Vol. 2, EPFL International Risk Governance Center.)