RESILIENT RECOVERY FACTORS: EXPLORATIVE STUDY

The present study was aimed at exploring how elements of resilience could contribute to early recovery of high risk incidents. Based on theoretical studies of resilience, Resilience Engineering and improvisation, a specific operationalization of resilience is suggested to explore the dynamics involved in successful recovery. The aim of the study was to explore how a set of resilience based ‘Contributing Success Factors’ (CSFs) could contribute to early successful recovery of high-risk incidents in development. Three resilience based factors were hypothesized (each with subdimensions): Risk awareness, Response capacity, and Support. The paper reports a first empirical testing, performed by means of in-depth research interviews regarding recovery of high-risk incidents in the offshore petroleum industry. Each interview was centered on one specific case of successful recovery: ‘the rig sectioning incident’, ‘the piping system incident’, and ‘the simultaneous operations incident’. The results revealed that although each case had their own unique path of scenario development, they shared an interesting common feature in terms of being short of elements that resilience prescribes. Based on these case-based interviews the potential contribution of the resilience based CSFs are discussed. It is argued that the CSF operationalization of resilience appear promising, both for studying cases that has happened (post hoc analysis), and as part of a proactive effort to expose implicated risk hubs in new scenarios, e.g.. consequences of new technology and new ways of organizing work.

[1]  Kingsley Hendrick,et al.  Investigating Accidents with Step , 1986 .

[2]  Erik Hollnagel,et al.  Resilience : The challenge of the unstable , 2006 .

[3]  K. Tierney.  Conceptualizing and Measuring Organizational and Community Resilience: Lessons From The Emergency Response Following The September 11, 2001 Attack on The World Trade Center , 2003 .

[4]  David Mendonça,et al.  Training for improvisation in emergency management: opportunities and limits for information technology , 2006 .

[5]  David Woods,et al.  Resilience Engineering: Concepts and Precepts , 2006 .

[6]  Erik Hollnagel,et al.  Epilogue: Resilience Engineering Precepts , 2006 .

[7]  M. Freitag,et al.  Structure of Event Analysis , 1997 .

[8]  Andrew Hale,et al.  After the Event: From Accident to Organisational Learning , 1998 .

[9]  Babette Fahlbruch,et al.  Event Analysis as Problem Solving Process , 1997 .

[10]  Karl E. Weick.  The impermanent organization , 2009 .

[11]  T. O. Grötan,et al.  THE INFLUENCE ON ORGANIZATIONAL ACCIDENT RISK BY INTEGRATED OPERATIONS IN THE PETROLEUM INDUSTRY , 2010 .

[12]  David Mendonça,et al.  Evaluating support for improvisation in simulated emergency scenarios , 2003, 36th Annual Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences, 2003. Proceedings of the.

[13]  K. Weick.  Making Sense of the Organization , 2000 .

[14]  M. Cunha,et al.  Organizational improvisation: what, when, how, and why , 1999 .

[15]  Urban Kjellen,et al.  Prevention of accidents through experience feedback , 2000 .