The Resilience Engineering Association has, in concert with the Symposium, a Young Talents program. This program invites graduate-level students pursuing research related to system resilience to share their work with the wider resilience community. On the day prior to the Symposium the ten selected Young Talents had met with thought leaders in the field, presented their work, and received feedback. This morning, the final morning of the Symposium, the students shared their work with our greater audience.
Still punch-drunk from my erratic and insufficient sleep patterns, I sat, taking in their presentations. They varied in domain; some in transportation, some in medicine, one disaster response, another social services. The presentations also varied in topic: how do we create a forward-looking accountability (as in, how do we hold leaders accountable in the future for the effects of decisions made today), how do we reconcile the different goals within an organization, how moments of success can create the obstacles and challenges in our next adaptive cycle(s). And then a gem, from a female student from Japan: are some organizations more lucky than others?
I had first noticed luck as a component of successful (or at least less disastrous) outcomes reading about United Flight 232. The accident sequence began with an uncontained engine failure, the debris from which severed lines serving all three hydraulic systems, rendering the flight controls of the DC-10 unresponsive. The cockpit crew, led by Al Haynes, could have been overwhelmed by the situation. One of the factors that contributed to the survival of so many on board was that a senior instructor pilot with the airline, one who just happened to practice and teach the use of differential thrust (turning an aircraft by reducing or adding power on one side and not the other) was riding as a passenger. His assistance managing the engine controls is cited as the critical factor that enabled the crew to triage the situation, control the aircraft, and guide the disabled airliner to the runway at Sioux City, Iowa. Over the years I had heard other stories that suggested luck: an engineering student who asked the right question of the right engineer; an oil platform manager who happened to notice an odd combination of readings in a control room; a pilot or disaster manager who happened to have heard a story (or otherwise learned some tribal wisdom) that provided the key to averting an adverse outcome. I had thought I was the only one to consider this, and was encouraged by its mention.
The lecture led to lively conversation as the next student set up his presentation: Do the components of resilience generate luck as a by-product? If so, which components are key, and can they be measured, designed in, or taught? Is it the extra resources available when an organization relaxes efficiency so a key measure of slack is available during non-standard operations? Is it the comprehensive mental models (developed over long periods of time and that include the key dependencies and interrelations between systems) that experts use to predict, prepare for, and call on in times of unease? Is it the presence of (and the culture that supports the presence of) requisite imagination (defined by Westrum as the fine art of imagining what might go wrong) that can see failure paths that others cannot? Or a combination of the these three, or others we had not considered? I sat, grateful that someone else had given voice to a question I had been pondering for the last few years.
By then, the next speaker was ready to begin, and we returned to the Young Talents program.
More Soon!
* Instructors and mentors take note: additional information about the Young Talents program, including application requirements and deadlines, are available here: http://www.resilience-engineering-association.org/blog/2016/11/15/rea-talent-program-2017-now-open/ The deadline for submissions for the June symposium is 26 January 2017.