David Wilbur and Kari Strobel PhD, Vetergy Group
With incidents on the rise and traditional root cause analyses no longer producing desired results, a new model for analyzing the human performer in incident investigation is needed to break through the cycle of repeated costly mistakes and performance plateaus. Operational resilience is defined as the capacity of an organization’s people to adapt their responses to changing system conditions through normal decision making. Cultivating adaptive capacity is the critical enabler of building operational resilience and the human performer’s ability to proactively identify and respond to normal and unanticipated system dynamics, emerging risks, and navigate disruptions.Using both qualitative and quantitative methods, we developed and evaluated a multi-dimensional model of operational resilience measuring the interactions between operating discipline (mechanical, process and human reliability), latent environmental factors, and multiple dimensions of adaptive capacity.