Amy Rankin

Resilience in Everyday Operations A Framework for Analyzing Adaptations in High-Risk Work

Managing complexity and uncertainty in high-risk sociotechnical systems requires people to continuously adapt. Designing resilient systems that support adaptive behavior requires a deepened understanding of the context in which adaptations take place, of conditions and enablers to implement these adaptations, and of their effects on the overall system. Also, it requires a focus on how people actually perform, not how they are presumed to perform according to textbook situations. In this paper, a framework to analyze adaptive behavior in everyday situations in which systems are working near the margins of safety is presented. Further, the variety space diagram has been developed as a means to illustrate how system variability, disturbances, and constraints affect work performance. The examples that underlie the framework and the diagram are derived from nine focus groups with representatives working with safety-related issues in different work domains, including health care, nuclear power, transportation, and emergency services.

A case study of factor influencing role improvisation in crisis response teams

Common characteristics of crisis situations are ambiguous and unplanned for events. The need for improvised roles can therefore be an imperative factor for the success of an operation. The aim of this study is to deepen the understanding of the processes taking place during improvised work “as it happens”. A case study of a crisis management team at work is presented and provides an in-depth analysis of the information and communication flow of persons acting in improvised roles, including contextual factors influencing the task at hand. The analysis suggests that three main factors lay behind decreased performance by the team when some of its members were forced to take on roles for which they lacked professional training; lack of language skills, lack of domain knowledge and insufficient organizational structure of the tasks. Based on the observations from this case study, we suggest three ways of improving a team’s performance and hence resilience when forced to improvise due to lack of personnel in one or more required competence areas. These are training to take on the responsibility for tasks or roles outside ones professional area of specialization, developing formal routines for changes in roles and tasks and developing and using tools and routines for information sharing.

Strategies for dealing with resistance to recommendations from accident investigations

Accident investigation reports usually lead to a set of recommendations for change. These recommendations are, however, sometimes resisted for reasons such as various aspects of ethics and power. When accident investigators are aware of this, they use several strategies to overcome the resistance. This paper describes strategies for dealing with four different types of resistance to change. The strategies were derived from qualitative analysis of 25 interviews with Swedish accident investigators from seven application domains. The main contribution of the paper is a better understanding of effective strategies for achieving change associated with accident investigation.

Resilience and vulnerability of small flexible crisis response teams: implications for training and preparation

Following the Asian Tsunami of 2004 and during the Israel–Lebanon Crisis of 2006, Sweden sent small crisis response teams to support civilians. The small size of the teams, combined with situations that did not always play out according to expectations and plans, presented a challenge to their resilience—their ability to adapt to circumstances outside of plans made in advance. In this paper, we analyze the experiences of 14 members of Swedish field teams involved in the crises response, based on focus group discussions. We describe a cycle of preparing for role improvisation, of taking improvised roles, of working in them, and of getting out of them when they are no longer a benefit. The discussions revealed that although role improvisation was seen as necessary to get the work done, they also saw a need to manage negative side effects and vulnerabilities of role improvisation in various ways. We discuss training goals based on their experiences, to address perceived strengths and vulnerabilities of role improvisation. We also discuss factors affecting role improvisation, such as a resilience climate of shared attitudes. Our results can be useful for organizations that have or that plan to adopt flexible crisis response teams. Our results can also be of interests to a more general audience with an interest in how practices necessary for resilience can bring negative side effects, for instance, resilience loss in the organization after an initial adaptive stage.

Sensemaking following surprise in the cockpit--a re-framing problem

Re-framing is the process by which a person “fills the gap” between what is expected and what has been observed, that is, to try and make sense of what is going on following a surprise. It is an active and adaptive process guided by expectations, which are based on knowledge and experience. In this article, surprise situations in cockpit operations are examined by investigating the re-framing process. The results show difficulties that pilots have in re-framing following surprise, including the identification of subtle cues and managing uncertainties regarding automated systems, coping with multiple goals, tasks and narrow time frames and identifying an appropriate action. A crew-aircraft sensemaking model is presented, outlining core concepts of re-framing processes and sensemaking activities. Based on the findings, three critical areas are identified that deserve further attention to improve pilot abilities to cope with unexpected events; (1) identification of what enables and obstructs re-framing, (2) training to build frames and develop re-framing strategies and (3) control strategies as part of the re-framing process.

Training systems design: bridging the gap between users and developers using storyboards

Motivation -- Designing distributed training systems for crisis management (CM) requires an approach with the ability to address a great variety of needs and goals. Crisis responses involve multiple agents, each with different backgrounds, tasks, priorities, goals, responsibilities, organizations, equipment, and approaches. Identifying the different user training needs and translating these into user and functional requirement therefore poses great challenges. Research approach -- In this paper we present experiences of how to enable the collaboration between multiple stakeholders and partners when creating and adapting ideas throughout the design phase. The techniques have been used in a European project aimed at developing an interactive Virtual Reality (VR) environment for training crisis management. Findings/Design -- The focus of the paper is on the initial storyboard iterations and lo-fi prototypes, as this is a crucial stage for expressing ideas in a perceivable way without having to spend too much time and effort on creating detailed prototypes. Take away message -- Experiences using low-cost commercial software for creating storyboards are presented, as these provided the means to create, share, present, adapt and circulate ideas, facilitating the fusing of ideas, shared understanding and distributed working.

Variable uncertainty: scenario design for training adaptive and flexible skills

Motivation -- Todays training systems for crisis management (CM) largely focus on technical and procedural skills. However the dynamic and unpredictable nature of a crisis also requires skills that are flexible, adaptive and creative. Training systems enforce limitations on the freedom of interaction the trainee has compared with the real world, thereby limiting their effectiveness for real world emergencies. Furthermore, the training scenarios are often played out in a linear and rigid manner, limiting the ability to train skills such as adapting to the on-going situation and being flexible in an uncertain and variable environment. Research approach -- The Variable Uncertainty Framework (VUF) has been developed as part of a European project (CRISIS) developing an interactive simulated Virtual Reality (VR) environment for training CM to address some of the challenges faced in training scenario design today. The principles from software systems design have been compared to those of instructional design to develop a framework that can be applied in this project. Findings/Design -- The VUF brings together three important dimensions of real-world emergencies that can be manipulated and controlled in virtual training environments: (1) situational complexity, (2) the number of events occurring simultaneously, and (3) the randomness of these events. By controlling these three dimensions in the training environment, an instructor can design scenarios that are either basic drill oriented, or advanced scenarios where events are complex and combined in un-predictable ways. Take away message -- The VUF is illustrated as a method of achieving the variability and complexity in the training scenario design. It offers an accessible method for instructors to design and adapt training scenarios to optimise the training effectiveness.

Approaches to team performance assessment: a comparison of self-assessment reports and behavioral observer scales

Human factors research popularly employs perception-based techniques to investigate team performance and its dependency to cognitive processes. Such studies frequently rely upon either observer-based or self-assessment techniques to collect data. In this study, we examined behavioral observer ratings and self-assessment ratings for measuring team performance in virtual teams, with team performance regarded as a combination of task outcome and team cognition. Juxtaposing self-assessments and observer ratings from a quasi-experiment comparing team performance rating techniques reveals that they indeed produce overall similar results, with both singling out teamwork effectiveness ratings as the strongest contributor to overall team performance. However, the comparisons show remarkably low correlation on individual questionnaire items. The most striking difference is that the team members’ self-assessments of workload are lower than the corresponding observer ratings. In particular, the self-assessments do not correlate at all with overall team performance, whereas the observers’ workload ratings are more consistent with contemporary research that suggests a strong correlation between workload and team performance, suggesting that observer-based techniques are more reliable than self-assessments for assessing workload. For other ratings, the results show that the two techniques are fairly equal, suggesting that the choice between methods to employ can be deferred to other considerations such as obtrusiveness, accessibility, and resource availability.

Making Sense of Adaptations: Resilience in High-Risk Work

To cope with variations, disturbances, and unexpected events in complex socio-technical systems people are required to continuously adapt to the changing environment, sometimes in novel and innovat ...