Factors underlying organizational resilience: The case of electric power restoration in New York City after 11 September 2001

Mendonça, David; Wallace, William A.

doi:10.1016/j.ress.2015.03.017

Cited by 42 publications

(25 citation statements)

References 51 publications

(49 reference statements)

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“…Further, factors enabling successful adaptation (in this case role-improvisation), are linked to organisational structure (joint briefings, hand-overs, joint log) suggesting that successful improvisation requires a certain amount of structure. This result is in congruence with previous literature on organisational improvisation that improvisation is a highly structured activity (Cunha, 1999;Grøtan, Størseth, Rø, & Skjerve, 2008;Mendonça & Wallace, 2015;Vera & Crossan, 2005). To improve a system's ability to adapt successfully in similar situations would thus require training of team efforts and a strong organisation of responsibilities and task.…”

Section: Control-loop Modelsupporting

confidence: 87%

“…However, a recent literature review (Righi, Saurin, & Wachs, 2015) highlighted that frameworks, guidelines and methods to identify and categorise resilience are often not further developed and validated. Further, the extent to which context-dependent adaptations can be generalised remains an open issue (Mendonça & Wallace, 2015). The study presented in Papers II and III exemplifies how previous frameworks can be revised through analysis of more cases.…”

Section: Develop and Validate Theories Methods And Toolsmentioning

confidence: 85%

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Making Sense of Adaptations: Resilience in High-Risk Work

Rankin¹

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The cover photo is taken on Gotland, Sweden iii To cope with variations, disturbances, and unexpected events in complex socio-technical systems people are required to continuously adapt to the changing environment, sometimes in novel and innovative ways. This thesis investigates adaptive performance in complex work settings across domains, with a focus on examining what enables and disables successful adaptations, and how contextual factors shape performance. Examples of adaptive performance studies include a crisis command team dealing with the loss of key personnel, a crew coping with unreliable system feedback in the cockpit, and a nursing team managing an overload of patients. The two main contributions of this thesis is the analysis of cases of people coping with variations and disturbances, and the development of conceptual models to report findings, structure cases, and make sense of sharp-end adaptations in complex work settings. The findings emphasise that adaptive performance outside procedures and textbook scenarios at the sharp end is a critical ability to cope with variation and unexpected events. However, the results also show that adaptations may come at the cost of new vulnerabilities and system brittleness. Analysing adaptive performance in everyday events informs safety management by making visible limitations and possibilities of system design, organisational structures, procedures, and training.v Komplexiteten i dagens säkerhetskritiska verksamheter, t.ex. flyg, sjukvård, kärnkraft och krisberedskap, gör det omöjligt att förutse och förbereda sig för alla potentiella händelser. För att hantera störningar och bibehålla kontroll vid oväntade händelser krävs att de operatörer som arbetar i systemet klarar av att anpassa sitt arbete i en komplex, föränderlig och dynamisk miljö. Det kan vara en krisorganisation som måste hantera att nyckelpersoner inte når fram till ett drabbat område, en pilot som ska fatta snabba beslut när flygsystemen ger otillförlitliga data eller en skeppsbesättning som manövrerar i en trång hamn just som dimman håller på att lägga sig.Säkerhetsarbete bygger idag på att identifiera risker samt att utreda olyckor och incidenter, dvs. situationer där ett system inte lyckats anpassa sitt arbete fullt ut. Att lära av brister från tidigare händelser är viktigt, men det belyser inte nog det arbete människor gör varje dag för att på ett säkert sätt hantera störningar och oväntade händelser. I forskningsfältet Resilience Engineering betonas dessa goda exempel -att förstå det som "går rätt" -vilket kompletterar dagens säkerhetsarbete genom att den resilienta förmågan, att anpassa sig till förutsedda och oförutsedda förhållanden, stärks.I denna avhandling studeras vardagssituationer och större händelser som kräver anpassning som ligger utanför vad som förväntas och således kräver ett visst mått av improvisation. I studierna ingår beskrivningar och analyser av verkliga situationer i flera olika domäner, exemplifierade ovan, där människor hanterar oförutsedda händelser och störningar. R...

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Section: Control-loop Modelsupporting

confidence: 87%

Section: Develop and Validate Theories Methods And Toolsmentioning

confidence: 85%

Making Sense of Adaptations: Resilience in High-Risk Work

Rankin¹

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“…This quadrant draws on the management disciplines of emergency management, crisis management, business continuity management, and safety management, as well as literature from the fields of organizational resilience, climate resilience, and disaster management (Linnenluecke and Griffiths 2012, Miao et al 2013, Mendonça and Wallace 2015. The adequacy of people's technical skills draws on the traditional reductionist approaches of sociotechnical systems thinking and human-machine interface design (Dekker 2005, Qureshi 2007, Klein 2008.…”

Section: Specified Social Resiliencementioning

confidence: 99%

A framework for conceptualizing and assessing the resilience of essential services produced by socio-technical systems

Merwe¹,

Biggs²,

Preiser³

2018

E&S

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ABSTRACT. Essential services such as electricity are critical to human well-being and the functioning of modern society. These services are produced by complex adaptive socio-technical systems and emerge from the interplay of technical infrastructure with people and governing institutions. Ongoing global changes such as urbanization and increasing prevalence of extreme weather events are generating much interest in strategies for building the resilience of essential services. However, much of the emphasis has been on reliable and resilient technical infrastructure. This focus is insufficient; resilience also needs to be built into the human and institutional processes within which these technical systems are embedded. Here, we propose a conceptual framework, based on a complex adaptive systems perspective, that identifies four key domains that require investment to build the resilience of essential services. This framework addresses both the technical and social components of the socio-technical systems that underlie essential services and incorporates specified and general resilience considerations. The framework can be used to guide resilience assessments and to identify strategies for building resilience across different organizational levels.

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“…Other examples of disasters in recent history include the Earthquake and Tsunami in Japan in (MacKenzie et al 2012, the Darfield Earthquake in New Zealand in 2010 (Whitman et al 2014;Kachali et al 2012), and Hurricane Katrina in 2005(Garnett & Kouzmin 2007. Likewise, anthropogenic disaster has occurred such as the accident at TEPCO's Fukushima Nuclear Power Plant (NPP) in 2011 (Omoto 2013;Langlois 2013) or the World Trade Centre attack in September 2001 (Kendra & Wachtendorf 2003;Mendonça & Wallace 2015).…”

Section: Description Of the Problemmentioning

confidence: 99%

A framework to study the resilience of organizations: a case study of a nuclear emergency plan

Ruiz-Martín¹

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Nowadays, building resilience is a key topic in many research fields such as Management, Engineering, Psychology or Ecology. The frequency increase of natural and anthropogenic disasters and the consciousness about their effects are among the reasons why resilience has gained importance and Governments are investing money in boosting the resilience of organizations, infrastructure, cities, individuals, etc. However, there is not much research on specific methodologies to design resilient organizations. A main goal of our research is to improve this aspect providing a framework to design resilient organizations. We explain how to design resilient organizations based on the Viable System Model principles. Then, we focus on an important aspect for being resilient: the communications. We use as a case study a Nuclear Emergency Plan from Spain to show the applicability of our framework. Since the communications in an organization can be modeled as a diffusion process in multiplex networks, and we did not find any suitable architecture to study them in the context of our case study, the architecture we design in this thesis is generic and allows us to model and simulate any kind of diffusion process in a dynamic multiplex network. iii Resumen El desarrollo de la resiliencia es un campo de investigación importante en ámbitos como el Management, la Ingeniería, la Psicología o la Ecología. La importancia del estudio de la resiliencia se ha visto desarrollada por el aumento tanto de desastres naturales como antropogénicos, así como por el desarrollo de conciencia acerca de sus efectos. Estas razones de peso han influido en que los Gobiernos estén invirtiendo recursos en la mejora de la resiliencia de organizaciones, infraestructuras, ciudades, individuos, etc. Sin embargo, a pesar de su importancia, el número de trabajos de investigación que se centran en el desarrollo de metodologías específicas para el diseño de organizaciones resilientes es reducido. El principal objetivo de esta investigación es mejorar este aspecto introduciendo un marco para el diseño de organizaciones resilientes. Para alcanzar este objetivo, se explica cómo emplear el Modelo de Sistemas Viables para el diseño de estas organizaciones. Nos hemos centrado en uno de los aspectos clave de la resiliencia: las comunicaciones. Para ello, se ha usado el caso de estudio del plan de emergencia de una central nuclear en España. Las comunicaciones en una organización pueden modelarse como un proceso de difusión en redes multiplex. Buscamos arquitecturas aplicables a nuestro caso de estudio. Sin embargo, no se ha encontrado ninguna que cumpliera con los requisitos que se necesitaban. Este hecho, nos ha llevado a proponer una nueva arquitectura, que además de permitir estudiar la difusión de información en una organización, permite estudiar otros procesos de difusión en redes multiplex. v I want to express my gratitude to: My thesis supervisors Dr. Adolfo López Paredes and Dr. Gabriel Wainer for being a guide during these years. Thanks for sharing your knowledge,...

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Factors underlying organizational resilience: The case of electric power restoration in New York City after 11 September 2001

Cited by 42 publications

References 51 publications

Making Sense of Adaptations: Resilience in High-Risk Work

Making Sense of Adaptations: Resilience in High-Risk Work

A framework for conceptualizing and assessing the resilience of essential services produced by socio-technical systems

A framework to study the resilience of organizations: a case study of a nuclear emergency plan

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