This paper offers a critical analysis of the concept of professional skill and cognition as it is conceived in the field of resilience engineering which is concerned with understanding how adaptive capacity is configured in complex sociotechnical systems. It is argued that the current disembodied and representationalist approach, separating thinking from acting, cannot accommodate resilience understood as adaptive capacity. Instead, an enactivist approach, emphasizing the constitutive coupling between embodied action and environment, is suggested as an ontological basis for research on resilience and adaptability in work.