Resilience in High Risk Work: Analysing Adaptive Performance

In today’s complex socio-technical systems it is not possible to foresee and prepare for all future events. To cope with the intricacy and coupling between people, technical systems and the dynamic environment people are required to continuously adapt. To design resilient systems a deepened understanding of what supports and enables adaptive performance is needed. In this thesis two studies are presented that investigate how adaptive abilities can be identified and analysed in complex work settings across domains. The studies focus on understanding adaptive performance, what enables successful adaptation and how contextual factors affect the performance. The first study examines how a crisis command team adapts as they lose important functions of their team during a response operation. The second study presents a framework to analyse adaptive behaviour in everyday work where systems are working near the margins of safety. The examples that underlie the framework are based on findings from focus group discussion with representatives from different organisations, including health care, nuclear, transportation and emergency services. Main contributions of this thesis include the examination of adaptive performance and of how it can be analysed as a means to learn about and strengthen resilience. By using contextual analysis enablers of adaptive performance and its effects the overall system are identified. The analysis further demonstrates that resilience is not a system property but a result of situational circumstances and organisational structures. The framework supports practitioners and researchers in reporting findings, structuring cases and making sense of sharpend adaptations. The analysis method can be used to better understand system adaptive capacities, monitor adaptive patterns and enhance current methods for safety management. This work has been supported by the Swedish Contingencies Agency and the FP7 European Framework Program.