Resilience Engineering

Resilience Engineering

Today we’re diving into the field of Resilience Engineering. This subject ticks a lot of my interest boxes: from complexity and sociotechnicality to psychological safety and leadership. I hope you find it interesting too!

Resilience Engineering is a multidisciplinary field associated with safety science, complexity, human factors and associated domains that focuses on understanding how complex adaptive systems cope with, and learn from, surprise.
 

TL;DR: In order to foster resilience, we must first create the conditions in which resilience can occur.
 

If you’ve read David Marquet’s “Turn The Ship Around” then you’ll be familiar with David’s story of taking command of the worst submarine in the US fleet, the USS Santa Fe, and transforming it and the crew into the most successful in the fleet. He did this by applying excellent leadership practices and fostering psychological safety so that crew members did not need to ask for permission or wait for orders. Instead, they declared their intent and possessed the agency to make important decisions. 

Whether or not you’ve read the book, hold the thought of that submarine. We’re going to come back to it.

What is Resilience Engineering?

Resilience Engineering (RE) addresses the ability of sociotechnical systems, such as teams, organisations, communities, nations, or even submarines, to anticipate, detect, respond and recover from disruptions. Those disruptions could be organisational changes, economic downturns, enemy threats, accidents, or pandemics. 

Resilience itself in RE terms, is “The intrinsic ability of a system to adjust its functioning prior to, during, or following changes and disturbances, so that it can sustain required operations under both expected and unexpected conditions.” – Prof Erik Hollnagel in Resilience Engineering in Practice, 2010. It is a field of study in its own right, and there’s even a Resilience Engineering Association. 

RE draws on a great range of domains including human factors, ergonomics, ecology, safety science, cognitive psychology, public health, and many more. Something you may hear quite often from RE practitioners is that “there is no root cause“, alongside a rejection of “human error” as a meaningful category of cause, as Erik Hollnagal writes in “The No View of Human Error”. Resilience engineering, like its companion subject of safety science, moves from seeing people as the problem, to the solution.

Because RE includes the word “engineering”, it can lead us to think of mechanical, structural, or software engineering, which is maybe a little misleading. In fact, at its core, RE is about people. As Erik Hollnagel has said repeatedly (Hollnagel & Woods, 2006), resilience is about what a system can do as opposed to something a system has. This includes considering a system’s capacity to anticipate, synchronise, respond and learn (From Resilience is a Verb by David D. Woods). In 2015, David Woods described organisational resilience as “sustained adaptive capacity” (from Reliability Engineering & System Safety). Resilience Engineering is becoming a core focus, and maybe the next evolution, of DevOps.
 

Resilience vs Robustness

Woods also helps to make a really important distinction between resilience and robustness as in this graphic from a great primer on Resilience Engineering by Lorin Hochstein. Robustness is the ability to sustain functioning despite disturbances, whilst resilience means dealing with unexpected challenges and learning from them. 

If we think about the cynefin categorisation of system states, robustness could be seen as being able to deal well with known unknowns, and resilience as being able to deal well with unknown unknowns. 

The physical structure of a submarine may be robust: it needs to be able to withstand the impact of a torpedo, for example. But in combination with the people on board who can identify threats, make quick decisions, take action and also learn from their experiences, the submarine can be resilient. In the torpedo example, through the skill, experience, and proactive decision making of the crew, they can avoid detection, and thus avoid the need to withstand a torpedo threat at all. In doing so, they not only avoid the threat, but they learn valuable lessons for the next time a similar threat occurs and are able to respond even more effectively. True resilience is responding effectively to surprise.

Possibly the best example of resilience is Richard Cook’s excellent talk about the resilient capabilities of bone, that we featured in a previous newsletter in tribute to the great Dr Cook. Bone is strong, but to be robust enough to withstand any impact, bone would be far too heavy for us to be able to walk. Instead, bone adapts to impacts, stressors and breaks, and grows back stronger in the areas where it needs to. In this way, it anticipates, detects and responds to challenges. 

This is my elbow after a mountain bike crash a few years ago. You can see the fresh break in the elbow, along with a healed break from a few years previously. The bone is thicker and denser around the old break, and with a little assistance from a surgeon, the bone around the new break will grow back stronger than before.

Systems are made of people and things

Sociotechnical systems comprise structures, technology, rules, inputs and outputs, and most importantly, people. As John Allspaw of Adaptive Capacity Labs said on Twitter, “Resilience is about the creation and sustaining of various conditions that enable systems to adapt to unforeseen events. *People* are the adaptable element of those systems.” The crew of a submarine anticipate, synchronise, respond, and learn. It’s these capabilities of people that provide resilience to systems, including submarines.

To reiterate: Resilience is the capability of being able to:

• Anticipate (by looking)
• Detect (by sensing and synchronising)
• Respond (by acting)
• Learn (by introspection and investigation)

If Resilience Engineering is about “systems” both anticipating and adapting to unforeseen events, the psychological safety of the people who form part of these systems is an essential component of resilience, alongside expertise, equipment, etc. 

Psychological Safety

Psychological safety enables people to take risks and speak up when they notice something going wrong. This is particularly important because most significant disruptions happen unexpectedly, so the ability to respond quickly and effectively is key to resilience. Cultures of psychological safety also increase the ability of people to recognise potential threats, develop contingency plans, and conduct regular drills, simulations and exercises to improve readiness. This allows steps to be taken to ensure that the system (the organisation, or in our example, the submarine) is best placed to respond to whatever happens. 

Resilience Engineering also connects to the idea of a learning organisation. In a 2008 article in HBR called “Is Yours a Learning Organisation?”, David Garvin, Amy Edmondson, and Francesca Gino described how “A learning organization is continually adapting and adjusting to remain viable in a changing world”. Here they are referring to the adaptive capacity of the people within the organisation and to me, this sounds a lot like resilience. 

People are the human, adaptable, element of resilience. If we are to anticipate threats, we need people to speak up about potential threats on the horizon. If we are to detect issues, people must speak up about mistakes, problems, and concerns. Responding effectively requires people to speak up with new ideas and take intelligent risks without fear of failure. And we can only learn if people can have honest and candid conversations about work, failure, and lessons learned. An environment, a substrate, of psychological safety is therefore foundational to resilience.

Footnote: 

If you’ve read Nassim Taleb’s work on “Antifragility”, you might have a sense that we’re talking about the same thing, and in some ways, we are. I believe that Resilience Engineering existed as a field of study before Taleb wrote on antifragility, and I understand the two concepts to be intrinsically linked.

This newsletter is sponsored by Conflux

Conflux is the leading business consultancy worldwide helping organizations to navigate fast flow in software. We help organizations to adopt and sustain proven, modern practices for delivering software rapidly and safely.

‘The Fearless Organization’ by Amy Edmondson is considered by many to be essential reading on the topic of psychological safety. In this article, Sophie Weston, Principal at Conflux, has put together some key takeaways from the book.

Psychological Safety in the Workplace

I love this from Marissa Solomon Shandell (@researchdoodles) on Instagram. This doodle was inspired by a new visual measure for burnout published last year (Matches measure: A visual scale of job burnout. Muir, Calderwood, & Boncoeur, 2022). 
 

This is a great piece from Gareth Lock at The Human Diver about intentional deviation. He describes the practice of skilled divers deviating intentionally from the plan because their experience provides them with the insight to anticipate issues that could result from closely following the plan. As in our newsletter on human error, deviation from procedure can be classed as an error, but drawing on expertise to know when to deviate from a procedure can sometimes be the key to success.

Aside: This advice is actually really useful for anyone who needs to navigate in unknown territory, whether you’re diving, hiking or something else. If you’re trying to reach a point on a ridge, river, wall or similar, instead of heading straight for it, intentionally “aim off” – navigate some distance perpendicular to it. If you aim directly for the waypoint but can’t see it when you get there, you don’t know whether you’re too far left or right. Instead, aiming off means when you get to the river, you simply walk downstream a little and you’ll find your waypoint.
 

Thanks so much to Becky Thomas for inviting me to talk about psychological safety on the fantastic Leadership Log podcast! We got into the origins of psychological safety, and some practical ways to “do” psychological safety at work.

Thanks to Amy Edmondson for signposting to this sketchnote by the fab illustrator Tanmay Vora, about proactive inquiry – attributes of a powerful question. Amy dives into how situational humility and engaging in proactive inquiry fosters greater psychological safety in her book, The Fearless Organisation.
 

This Economist piece about why “pointing fingers is unhelpful” is behind a paywall I’m afraid, but I had to share it for the line about how “Shaggy cultures” show up in low share prices. So if you don’t have a subscription to the Economist, instead here’s Shaggy, with “It Wasn’t Me”.
 

This week’s poem:

It Wasn’t Me, By Simbo Rumblebelly

It wasn’t me who ate the cake 
Coincidence my belly aches 
I surely didn’t lick the cream 
I say it’s not all as it seems 
 
It wasn’t me who ate the pie
Would you believe I’d ever lie?
And as for eating up that stew
There’s still enough there left for you!
 
It wasn’t me who spilt the beer
It’s chance my empty mug is near
The floor it may be stained a bit
Just put the rug on top of it
 
It wasn’t me broke the door
I swear that it was broke before
I also haven’t lost the key
It’s just not where it’s meant to be
 
It wasn’t me who scared the cat
I’d never do a thing like that
And did I really scare the horse?
It’s always running off, of course!
 
It wasn’t me who did those things
It’s never trouble that I bring
It wasn’t me who did such wrong
Nothing to see, just move along
 
I tell you every word is true
I don’t do naught I shouldn’t do
So what it was that you did see
I tell you now, it wasn’t me!