I wasn’t expecting so many surfboards. To be honest, I wasn’t expecting surfboards at all. But as soon as I saw them they made sense; Lisbon is a sheltered port just north of Gibraltar, of course they would have great waves. Alas, no surfing for me, I was here for the Resilience Engineering Symposium. But to be honest, at this point I was feeling anything but resilient.
At some point in transit I realized I had not planned this trip well. In fact, I recognized I had not been making good decisions for a while, possibly due to my aggressive travel schedule, extended encounter with high elevations, or the resulting fatigue from either or both. Long story short: by the time I reached Lisbon I had gotten eight hours of sleep over the previous four days and I was beat. Even better: I had left myself no daylight to recon the Symposium’s location (a small school in the suburbs). Fortunately I did have a nice room in a nice hotel. I pulled the blinds and hit the sack.
The idea to attend this conference had come to me during a hike in New Mexico. It had been a new (to me) trail, east and north of where I usually hiked, through piñon groves nestled along the slopes and canyons below an upscale housing development. “Don’t the resilience guys have their conference this year? Is that something I would want to do?” I was excited, because this was the first thing even remotely professional that I’d wanted to do since leaving Connecticut. Back at the lodge, I clandestinely broke internet silence to check the location and dates. Woo Hoo, there was still time for me to register and book travel! I pondered this thought during the next week (silent retreat), and once back on the road (read: experiencing sea level oxygen for the first time in weeks) I made the arrangements.
Over the years, I’ve learned there are many different factions within the safety community. There are the System Safety traditionalists, who use tools (such as FMEAs and fault trees) developed in the 1950s to support the mechanistic systems of that age, to deconstruct and analyze systems and their hazards at the component, subsystem and system levels. There is the Human Reliability Analysis (HRA) cohort who, following Three Mile Island created methods to include human performance factors in safety analyses. (These are often dismissed by the traditionalists because they present performance ranges rather than precise failure probabilities.) The Shuttle Challenger and Chernobyl accidents brought us ‘Normal Accident Theory’, the premise that humans induce instability in systems so to increase safety designers need to control (or design out) human inputs to the greatest extent possible. In counterpose, the High Reliability community believe it is systems that are inherently unstable, that human operators perform near constant local adaptations to ward off disaster, and we should develop methods and structures to understand and support these interventions. Westrum raised the concept of organizational safety cultures across a spectrum from generative to bureaucratic to pathological. Crew resource management taught us to improve our communications, and Rochlin explained safety is a social construct, an agreed-upon balance between production and protection that a community takes on over time. Then there is another group, one that suggests we should not design systems only ‘to the scene of the accident’ but beyond, to not just design out or mitigate known hazards but also include elements to sustain or recover operations in the event of unexpected disruption. These are the Resilience Engineers, the cats I had traveled to Portugal to meet.
So I woke the next morning (not quite) bright eyed and bushy tailed (is it coincidence the Portuguese term for ‘wake up call’ is ‘despertar’?), eager for the day ahead of me. I got up, brushed my teeth, did my hair, and put on some ‘grown up clothes’. After breakfast, I made the trek down the cobblestone sidewalks (in princess heels, who’s idea was THAT?) to the Metro station where, after a quick stop for some Euros, I found the Yellow Line and hopped on a train. Three stops and I was off… to a neighborhood that looked nothing like the one I had scouted on Google Maps. After some queries I was back on the train, this time six stops in the opposite direction. Once at the top of the steps it looked like the right spot. But I had trouble orienting myself, and after wandering what looked the proper direction for what felt like the proper length of time I was hopelessly lost. But no fear, there was a lobby, with what looked like a front desk. I stepped in, and what did I see? Violet and white Symposium posters! Somehow, despite my best efforts, I had reached my destination!
Once badged I entered the auditorium and found a spot towards the back. On stage was a short, thin, greying man, describing fascinating things: the negative language and frames used by many safety professionals, quantum weirdness, and accommodating variability within a system. Heaven! And this was only just the beginning.
Well, it was a busy three days so I will take a break here. More soon!