Analysis of work practices from the resilience engineering perspective

NORROS Leena

VTT Technical Research Centre of Finland, Systems Research, PO Box 1000, 02044 VTT, Finland (Leena.Norros@vtt.fi)

Abstract: According to the main assumptions of the Resilience Engineering approach, one of the main challenges of safety management in organizations is to strike balance between pre-planned preparedness and situation-driven acting. In order to act in an adaptive way in unexpected situations, and to develop structures and processes, organizations need to create appropriate shared awareness of what they understand by system safety. Beyond this, there must be sufficient understanding of actual work practices and how they support system safety and resilience. An ecological analysis of practice for the facilitation of these aims will be proposed in the paper. It is also important for the control of safety that the used technologies and tools couple smoothly with human conduct. A concept of systems usability will be proposed as the quality criterion for evaluation of technologies. The evaluation exploits the analysis of performance outcome, practices and user experience and focuses on testing the tools’ capability to facilitate resilience of the system. Demonstration of the use of the outlined analysis of practices and tools is based on own research in different safety critical complex work domains.
Keyword: safety management; complex sociotechnical systems; interpretative practice; systems usability