Team reflection makes resilience-related knowledge explicit through collaborative sensemaking: observation study at a rail post

Abstract

Resilience is defined as the ability to adaptively deal with system boundaries in the face of the unexpected and unforeseen (Branlat and Woods in AAAI Fall Sympoisum, 2010. http://www.aaai.org/ocs/index.php/FSS/ FSS10/paper/viewPaper/2238). We hypothesize that drawing upon resilience-related knowledge is a prerequisite for such adaptivity. This paper proposes team reflection (Ellis et al. in Curr Dir Psychol Sci 23(1):67-72, 2014) as a macrocognitive function to make the resilience-related knowledge explicit. This knowledge is implicitly available with individual team members active at the sharp end but is never explicitly shared due to invisibility of goal-relevant constraints. To overcome this invisibility, we suggest an application that makes changes in the current rail sociotechnical system visible in terms of the three system boundaries, a variation of the originally proposed by Rasmussen (Saf Sci 27(2/3):183-213, 1997): safety, performance and workload. This allows a team of rail signallers to analyse movements towards system boundaries and share knowledge on these movements. An observational study at a rail control post was conducted to assess the value of team reflection in making resilience-related knowledge explicit. For this purpose, we developed a first prototype of the application concerning the performance boundary only. Using naturalistic observations of a team during a week, we observed how they reflected at the end of their shift on salient system changes. A global content analysis was used to show the relevance of the content to resilience and to test the increase in the resilience-related knowledge throughout the observation period. A specific case of a human approaching the rail tracks, as a potential suicide, was analysed in detail. The results show the value of team reflection on system movements towards their boundaries, thus making goal-relevant constrained knowledge explicit within the operational rail environment.

What the COVID-19 pandemic tells us about the need to develop resilience in the nursing workforce

“…McGee (2006) suggested that nurses can support their own mental and spiritual well-being by sharing their experiences of vulnerability and resilience through reflective journals and debriefing. This can also enhance emotional insight, according to Giordano | PEER-REVIEWED | © RCN Publishing Company Limited 2020 (1997), and can be done individually or as a team (Siegel and Schraagen 2017).…”

Sensemaking in Critical Situations and in Relation to Resilience—A Review

“…In an article on team reflection [62], the authors use reflection and the data-frame theory of sensemaking to show the relationship between knowledge and resilience, listing sensemaking, or situation assessment as one of several team resilience abilities. The Cynefin framework, used as a sensemaking device, may be an effective lens to view and understand the concept of resilience [63].…”

Sensemaking and resilience in safety-critical situations: A literature review

“…Some describe sensemaking as a more cognitive process and refer to Klein's macro-cognitive/dataframe model (Hoffman & Hancock, 2017;Siegel & Schraagen, 2017), whereas others refer to the work of both Weick & Klein (e.g. Landman et al, 2017;Norros et al, 2014;Rankin et al 2014).…”

“…The model unifies and complements existing models by explicitly modelling resilience factors and the actors 'sensemaking and control functions and technologies' variety. Other authors using sensemaking theory to describe aspects of resilience, is Siegel & Schraagen (2017). In their article on team reflection, they make an attempt to use reflection and the data-frame theory of sensemaking to show the relationship between knowledge and resilience.…”

“…However, several of the reviewed papers discuss training that is aimed at enhancing resilience (Bergström, 2012;Grøtan & van der Vorm, 2015;van der Beek & Schraagen, 2015). Siegel & Schraagen (2017), describe processes and HMI tools to make boundaries explicit in railway operations. In the maritime sector the ability to handle demanding operations safely is increasingly dependent on ICT-based control systems, e.g.…”