Unearthing weak signals Engineering for safer and more efficient socio-technical systems – The Structured Exploration of Complex Adaptations (SECA) method

Traditionally, a system is considered safe if characterized by a limited number of failures. Nonetheless, uncertainty about future performance, continuous changes, and finiteness of resources are conditions that many systems commonly experiment when confronting with hazardous operations. Understanding system’s resilience becomes then relevant, being this latter concerned with systems’ ability to sustain operations under both expected and unexpected conditions. Even before its first white paper on Resilience Engineering in Air Traffic Management (ATM) dated back to 2007, EUROCONTROL promotes the need for in-depth investigations of performance variability (Leonhardt et al., 2009). The goal of such investigations consists of capturing weak signals and offering proactivity against future uncertainty. On this path, towards the end of 2011, EUROCONTROL started a namesake project called “Weak Signals in ANSP’s safety performance” to investigate what kind of data operators usually rely on and use to increase system’s resilience (Hollnagel et al., 2021). Weak signals are embedded in the socio-technical knowledge orchestration played by the parts the system is made up of. Knowledge is a crucial irreplaceable asset an organization owns: it is a key to organizational efficiency and success. Accordingly, understanding system performance implies delving into organizational knowledge, and the way it is generated, converted, shared, and used in case of both abnormal events and normal operations. Knowledge management thus plays an instrumental role to progress and improve system’s performance, especially when the system at hand is a complex socio-technical one. This White Paper seeks to provide an answer to the following questions: • What is the relationship between knowledge management and weak signals in socio-technical systems? • How should a pragmatical solution be designed to collect knowledge on these weak signals? With specific reference to the latter question, this White Paper introduces SECA (Structured Exploration of Complex Adaptations), a novel method inspired by Resilience Engineering and knowledge management principles for capturing and analysing weak signals.