Assessing resilience in everyday work through observations. an assessment framework for complex sociotechnical systems

Complex sociotechnical systems have multiple interacting elements, originating residual uncertainties that permeate the people working in these systems daily. Agents constantly adapt the system’s performance to achieve the system’s goals by coping with threats and opportunities that challenge the system’s status quo. Resilience Engineering emerged as a safety management paradigm aiming to help these systems deal with uncertainties by engineering adaptive capacities; helping them is only possible by assessing resilience - a challenging task - which must be based on understanding everyday work. This study developed an assessment framework, named Resilient Performance Assessment Framework (RePAF), based on the DARWIN Resilience Management Guidelines to assess resilience through observations. The framework was instantiated in the Oil and Gas industry domain and used to evaluate cargo handling operations aboard a drilling ship. The instantiation showed that the assessments were able to shed light on the interactions between the elements that originated the system’s response to a threat that occurred. The framework can be used to understand daily work at organizational levels - other than operational ones - and further complex sociotechnical systems to know how this work is performed.