Shift your thinking from personal resilience to group resilience

1.    Introduction

2.    How do risks change in changing times

3.    A definition for resilience in changing times

4.    How does a resilience strategy align with Critical and Crisis Risk Management approaches

5.     How resilience can be embedded into an organization for full effect?

6.    How might this look within an operational risk management approach & system?

Following the initial wave of the 2020 pandemic and national lockdowns that occurred across different countries there has been a noticeable focus on mental health and on the importance of personal resilience and resilience development to support people through tough times and maintain the performance of the organisations greatest resource.  Is personal resilience development for the employees the most effective approach? 

My experience working in and alongside teams and organisations and studying operational performance research have led me to appreciate that:

1      There is a relationship between personal resilience and mental wellbeing and team resilience and operational reliability.  Because of this relationship I would argue that mental health is not just a personal quality but also a community and social phenomenon.  Social, team and organisationals level factors and processes can have a significant impact on mental health and the higher level the issue the wider the impact.

2      Front line workers are actually inherently resilient even if operational leaders don't realize it.   In times of pressure or operational stress, the people who bear the brunt of it are the front line workers.  They need to be resilient whether the other parts of the organization support them or not because they are on the front line.   When operational systems breakdown, they are the ones who need to react and adapt and then stay alert to what is happening to be able to then anticipate the follow on effect and also what is coming up next.  Operational workers are resilient because they have to be…they don't have a choice.

So if an organizational leader is genuinely committed to enabling better mental health for its employees then I would argue that; to have the biggest impact ; organizational resilience will trump personal resilience every time.

Resilient organisations are also psychologically safe places to work because it an inherent part of resilience.  So focus on resilience in general if you want to support your people’s mental health and the wellbeing of your business together in time of change.  

To have the greatest impact on resilience, the way that a team or organizational leader can support them and drive organizational performance is by taking steps to support their front line workers by building resilient attitudes, practices and systems back through the various layers of management and governance.  This not only benefits people throughout the organization and in doing so it fosters and enables wellbeing, it also enables the organization as a whole to respond more rapidly and effectively in times of challenge and change.

This paper explores the topic of Operational Resilience and Reliability – Adaptive capacity and describes how to build it in practice via an operational policy within an Operational Health and Safety Management System (OHSMS).

How do risks change in changing times? 

Different risk management methods are needed for different situations.  This is described well by David Snowdons often referenced Cynefin framework where he describes four risk management decision-making contexts; or "domains” that help managers to identify how they perceive situations to make decisions. 

They are obvious (or simple), complicated, complex,  chaotic, and with a further  space of disorder at the centre. 

These four contexts require leaders to diagnose situations and identify opportunities and risks and then to act in ways that are appropriate for that.

The Cynefin model can be applied to all sorts of different work situations including risk management.  Because each context has different characteristics the risk management approach also needs to change.   The fundamental argument that it raises is that different types of risks or risk factors require different risk management strategies.

Mental health, as an example, is highly complex overall so requires quite a different risk management strategy to other more technical engineering oriented risks.

In a stable industry with predictable risks or for simple low risk work activities there may be limited need for resilience oriented approaches to risk management but when things get challenging, complex or start changing again and again then operational resilience is an important risk management capacity. 

This is particular true if the work involves hazardous operations and this is also very true for wellbeing oriented risks like mental health and psychological demands because these are such complex and ‘intangible’ risks that are dependent on peoples behaviours and relationships and perceptions. 

The table below describes the four different domains and the most appropriate risk management approach.

Obvious	The domain of ‘known knowns’.  These are operational situations and risks characterized by stability and clear cause-and-effect relationships that are easily discernible by everyone.	General risk management approaches are applicable
Complicated	The Domain of known unknowns and experts.  These are operations and risks that have a clear relationship between cause and effect, but where not everyone can see it - so it requires analysis and where the solutions are largely technical.	A Critical Risk Management model is highly applicable
Complex	The domain of emergence and unknown knowns.  The whole situation or risk context is far more or different than the sum of its parts. In these situations people are often required to use judgment and make decisions, often without all the information available or where tradeoffs are required.   For these reasons there is no one-right way to manage risks and the process to find solutions are as important as the actual solution.	Resilience and ‘adaptive capacity’ oriented risk management approaches are suited
Chaotic	The Domain of ‘unknown unknowns’ and Rapid Response.  In these crisis or emergency type situations things are changing so fast so a leaders job is to react and respond to manage the immediate situation.	Crisis Management Approaches are most appropriate

Through a series of ‘Covid-specific’ podcasts, in April 2020, Todd Conklin (a well known Safety podcaster and industry leader) interviewed Sydney Dekker.  During the podcast he eloquently described resilience within a health and safety context as the capacity to adapt and as ‘Bouncing Forward’.  

In the April podcast Dekker’s basic argument was that; when risks are impossible to predict, an organisation needs to have an inbuilt capacity to pay attention to change and then quickly respond and adapt.  He explains how this is different from the traditional definition of resilience, which is the ability to absorb change then bounce back to a former state.  He explains how this type of resilience isn’t fully suited because the playing field is changing, so teams and organisations need to be able to absorb the risks and adapt and change accordingly knowing that new risks will be continuing to arise.

Dekker further highlights how Traditional metrics used to identify performance do not help to measure resilience (ability to keep pace with continual change.) measuring constant / predictable risk profile (linear) vs. measuring unpredictable profile. There is limited value in reporting on the risks because they are constantly changing. Instead it is more important to assess the underlying ability to manage new risks.

Supporting this approach from a leadership perspective Snowdon identifies leadership characteristics that that are best suited to complex situations which can not be fully understood through analysis and logic (Reference Y).  He outlines how to be most effective leaders should…  

·      Probe first, then sense, and then respond

·      Conducts experiments that are safe to fail

·      Patiently allow paths forward to reveal themselves

·      Set the stage, step back a bit, allow patterns to emerge, determine which ones are desirable to continue with

·      Set outcomes and give teams and team members the freedom to work with users to come up with the solutions themselves

·      For more information refer to Reference (Y): 

Understanding Resilience

There is a military saying that no battle plan survives more than five minutes after engagement with the enemy.

Organizational resilience can be described as a commitment to support workers in managing complex risk situations by fostering the capacity of the organization to adapt at all levels - team, management and organizational.  There are different definitions for resilience depending on the nature of the situation.  This article will focus on the current operating environment, which is very unpredictable at an international level due to the 2020 Pandemic. 

“the ability of an organistion to manage unpredictable risks and risk factors (associated with complexity and change) by learning and adapting at all operational levels (personal, team, organisational) to effectively ‘bounce forward’ into new ways of working and being organized”

Having an explicitly resilience and reliability approach that sits along the Critical risk and Crisis management approaches acknowledges that sometimes operational contexts are complex and uncertain (situations, environments, risks, risk factors, scale or human biases or because the system simply wasn’t working as planned at that time.  Because of these factors risks cannot be predicted and so need to be managed in a different way to critical controls.  Being resilient is driven by leadership and includes having a just culture where leaders make decisions fairly following errors and events, but it is more than that as well.     

A Model from Resilience Engineering 

There is a lot of current research and focus into the topic of resilience in general because it relates to some very important issues of our time including climate change and management of social issues like inequality.  There are also a number of different academic disciplines and philosophy’s that research resilience, wellbeing and related topics within organistions.  High Reliability Organisational Theory, Psychological Safety and Resilience Engineering.  As this is a short article we will just explore one or two approaches. 

Resilience Engineering is one such safety research discipline that studies safety in organisations.  It is championed by Dr Eric Holnagel and Dr David Woods who have conducted research into resilient organistions.  

Rather than studying different ‘critical risks’ independently the resilience engineering approach is to ask what makes an organistion resilient in general and so able to effectively manage any critical risk and identifies technical methods to build resilience into their work practices. 

Resilience engineering research has identified four capacities that resilient organisations have embedded within their operational practices.  These are capacities to anticipate, monitor, learn, and to respond and adapt to change:

Anticipate	The capacity and skills to anticipate threats and opportunities and the space to do it.  This involves going beyond risk analysis to imagine what might happen to deal with the irregular and unexpected events not yet on the horizon
Monitor	There is capacity to monitor their internal and external environment in a flexible way to identify what else could be critical in the near future.   They then adjust responses in a flexible way to unexpected demands.
Respond / Adapt	They have ways for teams and team members to learn from experience which requires actual events from both what goes well and what goes wrong
Learn	Ways to enable teams and team members to proactively engage in learning from experience of actual events from both what goes well and what goes wrong without the need for formal processes

How does a resilience strategy align with Critical and Crisis Risk Management approaches

Snowdons Cynefin framework introduced earlier in the article describes the nature of different situations (or contexts) including the difference between those that are complicated and complex.

Critical control programmes are highly suited to complicated situations.  This is because they focus primarily on managing individual ‘critical risks’  independently and through analysis and in a structured and planned way.   Critical risks are identified and singled out then the separate risk scenarios are broken down into separate risk scenarios and critical points, which can be managed via critical controls to prevent harm.  As a result controls always tend to be focused on the front line because that is where analysis shows the critical points to be.

Having general and critical risk management programmes is a way for an organisation to set itself up to manage risks that can be foreseen.  But the approach has limitations.  In the task of driving, some good examples of critical controls include seat belts and ABS brakes.  These are vital and important part of the risk management puzzle but in the real operational world it does not fully ensure an operator is always able to drive safely & well.  There are some things that occur that cannot be predicted and managed via these controls.   

A different approach again is required to managing a crisis because of the differing nature of the situation.  A crisis is so unpredictable and happens so fast that every action and decision is to address an urgent need.  This is why a crisis management plan seeks to manage risks in a different way with exercises and very dynamic response structures and processes.

There will be times outside of a crisis where everybody has to juggle multiple risks that actually have competing priorities or where, even outside of a crisis, they have to make decisions about moving forward even though critical controls are not in place.   This is what Snowdon describes as the ‘complex’  domain and is quite common in workplaces.  

These complex situations require people to have an ability to self-monitor and anticipate, creatively adapt, learn and share across multiple team levels.  In these situations the front line workers will adapt not matter what because they need to.  Workers are resilient… they don't have a choice.

Far greater benefit comes of these capacities are also exist within the way that operational teams interact and work together and within the management and functional teams that support them.  Even up to the organistions governance processes and established leadership practices themselves. 

Case Study

An example, from High Reliability Organistions (HRO) research of a healthcare organization with a mature approach to resilience and reliability, and how operational teams can function.

High Reliability Organization (HROs) are anomalies. They exist in the kind of very complex, fast-evolving environments where you would expect chaos to prevail. But it doesn’t. HROs are able to cope successfully with unexpected conditions.

Example from HRO Healthcare organisations

·      Supporting frontline caregivers freedom to choose how to do work without needing to follow orders. 

·      Giving frontline nurses the flexibility and support to derive care plans by problem solving (many different solution to care) independent of policy.  They know that the complexity of individual situations means the individual front line workers need the ability to make judgments based on their professional experience and the situation in front of them.

·      HRO research also shows how successful adapters do goal directed team formation by building teams around problems solving rather than job title. 

·      Actively promote avoiding naming, shaming & blaming to share and learn from their errors

·      Frontline workers have freedom to try specific interventions for particular patient needs (there are no mistakes, just learning)

·      Front line teams are supported with a clinical specialist always available within 20mins if needed and where errors are promoted as teaching opportunities so that they can be addressed and fixed more quickly.

Key Operating Principles Identified within High Reliability Organizations (HROs)

·      Deference to front line Expertise

·      Preoccupation with Failure (emergence)

·      Reluctance to Simplify (Whole of system thinking)

·      Sensitivity to Operations

·      Commitment to Resiliency (learn from error and adapt with new capacity)

QUESTION: If your organistion has a critical control programme.  Look at the one that are highly dependent on people or the local context of an operational site and ask yourself; how adaptable and resilient are these controls?

How can resilience be embedded within an organization for fuller effect?

Resilience can occur at all different levels and every organisation can have pockets of resilience.  But for an organisation to be highly resilient and reliable and able to fully support operational teams to carry out hazardous operations safely and in a way that fosters and sustains wellbeing, its important to establish principles and embedded practices to anticipate, monitor, learn and adapt (adaptive capacity) at all levels. 

Critical risk management approaches focus primarily on front-line controls.  Conversely, Elinor Ostram said that if the nature of systems that are being governed (regulating) are complex, it is essential that there is also complexity in the governance systems.  W Ross Ashby (Design for a Brain: The origin of Adaptive Behaviour (1960) described the “Law of Requisite Variety”, that any regulative system need as much variety in the actions that it can take as exists in the system it is regulating.

CASE STUDY:

In 2019 a colleague of mine explained how impressed he was with an operational team that ran a bulk storage depot and the way they ran their monthly safety meetings.  Unlike most safety meetings the team did not sit around together in the meeting room with an agenda.  Instead he described how they walked around their site exploring it and pointing out different ‘unexpected’ scenarios that could happen and then considering what that may then lead to and how they would manage the cascading effects.  They were obsessed with failure in a really positive way that enabled them to be very prepared.

Psychological Demands - a risk specific example

The characteristics of Psychological Demands-Wellbeing as a workplace risk include:

-       That it has a large and varied set of risk factors covering all aspects of the work  (the workplace, the work, the workers)

-       All levels of management influence and are influenced by each other

-       There are a mixture of work related and personal risk factors

-       The system is open

-       Issues are highly contextual.  They can only be fully understood with local knowledge

-       Outcomes are unpredictable. 

o   A stressful event like a client committing suicide can have an entirely different impact on one person (a manageable challenge) vs. another (overwhelming emotions requiring time off work). 

o   Expectations following announcement of Covid level 4 in NZ was that a large percentage of staff would be impacted mentally and require support.

o   Events that are a daily occurrence in one part of the system (e.g. threats and abuse in Custodial) would be potentially destabilizing in another.

-       The relationship between the different factors and system parts can be as important as the factors themselves (e.g. the relationship between people or between job demands & job control)

Why now? – The Current Context as a Driver for a developing resilience

The pandemic is a real-life example of how different risk management strategies are needed for different operational situations and needs.  The events of the last 5 months following the Covid outbreak have put on the spotlight on the H&S risk management capabilities of organisations around the world and particularly their abilities to respond initially to the pandemic Crisis, the strength of their critical controls programmes and also the ongoing capacity of their front line teams to adapt to changing circumstances or when critical controls programmes weren’t able to be implemented as planned. 

Another consideration is the idea that new safety and wellbeing are more suited to organisations with more mature approaches to health and safety and where the critical risk management fundamentals are already in place and where they are ready to be innovative.  An alternative to this is the idea that it is a risk management capability that is actually needed while a Critical Risk Management capability is being established and implemented.  A critical risk management system will never be working perfectly and the context is always changing then the capacity for adaptation and resilience will support teams to better manage the unpredicted risks.

HOW

So where to start?  As an organizational leader wanting to build resilience, you should probably focus your efforts at the levels that you can have the most influence and impact. 

Team members	Front line operators have no option but to be resilient.  An organization can provide support and encouragement but cannot directly control this level.
Leadership	Alongside the functional changes that can be implemented to provide capacity to adapt within an organistional system, leaders at all levels can adopt leadership practices that are best suited to complex situations that can not be fully understood through analysis and logic (Reference Y):    ·      Probe first, then sense, and then respond ·      Conducts experiments that are safe to fail ·      Patiently allow paths forward to reveal themselves ·      Set the stage, step back a bit, allow patterns to emerge, determine which ones are desirable to continue with ·      Set outcomes and give teams and team members the freedom to work with users to come up with the solutions themselves ·      For more information refer to Reference (Y):
Operational teams	How a team functions will provide a layer of capacity to adapt (resilience) during times of challenge and change. Consider how your team currently functions and ask: in what ways do our team level practices and processes along with our collective attitudes enable team members to: -       Monitor variable conditions across the team? -       Anticipate potential risks on the horizon? -       Continually learn from each other? -       Quickly and effectively adapt as needed? What else could you starts, stop or do more or less of? Other examples of supports -       Just decision guides -       Ability to establish agile front line teams around work projects rather than job titles -       Time within schedules for regular monitoring and learning initiatives -       Ways to learn collaboratively from failure and success (e.g. Learning teams, reflective practice, retrospectives)
Regional and business unit management	In additional team level capacity, larger organisations will have regional and business unit middle management groups that are the conduits both up and down the organization so for an organization to be highly resilient they also need capacity within their practices, processes and activities to be able to anticipate and monitor the variable conditions to learn and adapt. Consider things like: -       Pre & Post job debriefs.  -       Time within schedules for regular monitoring and learning initiatives between teams and operational levels.  -       Forward focused scenario planning -       Human Centered Design and other proactive learning initiatives -       Agile Project Management
Safety, Health and Wellbeing team and other organizational support functions (e.g. Safety and Wellbeing team)	To build resilience into safety systems and initiatives, the safety and wellbeing team needs methods to design and implement or update systems and initiatives that have a corresponding resilience and adaptive capacity. For example for work on complex operational processes that involve where people play a big role, then instead of traditional engineering and waterfall approaches consider -       Human Centered Design (or User Experience) methods -       Agile project management methods Human-centered design (HCD) is a term product creators use to describe a process of designing for people. HCD develops solutions to problems by involving the human perspective in all steps of the problem-solving process.  Principles ·      Co-design ·      Focus upon the people (identify the real goal of real users) ·      Find the right problem ·      Think of everything as a whole system ·      Always test your design decisions (experiment) Agile Project Management (REF Tihi App) Agile Project Management (APM) is an iterative approach to planning and guiding project processes for complex and unpredictable. Values ·      User / Customer Collaboration Over Contract Negotiation ·      Individuals and Interactions Over Processes and Tools ·      Working Products Over Comprehensive Documentation ·      Responding to Change Over Following a Plan Example Practices include - Scrum teams; Sprint Cycles; Kanban
Governance and senior leadership	To maintain resilience at the highest level, any governance (regulation) system designed to regulate a complex organization or large team must have as much variety in the actions it can take as there exists in the systems being regulated. (X) Elinor Ostram describes how the most effective systems of governance for complex situations will be deep and nested and have the following characteristics: 1      They are multi-tiered 2      They provide the necessary information for decision making at each level 3      Risk management rules protect workers rather than punish them?   (Quasi-voluntary compliance - Margaret Levi 1988) 4      They deal with conflict well 5      They drive a just culture where self-regulation occurs and is undertaken primarily by the participants themselves 6      Provide physical, technical, and institutional infrastructure 7      Encourage adaptation and change Resilience Performance measurement ·      There is limited value in reporting on the risks because they are constantly changing? ·      Instead it is more important to assess the underlying ability to manage new risks? ·      How well are teams and other groups keeping pace with continual change?

References

1.     A Leader’s Framework for Decision Making, by David J. Snowden and Mary E. Boone, 2007

2.    Scales, Polycentricity, and Incentives: Designing Complexity to Govern Complexity.  By Elinor Ostrom

3.    Pre-accident Podcast 249 - Todd Conklin

4.    Four Concepts for Resilience and the implications for the future of Resilience Engineering DavidD.Woods

5.    https://applyingresilience.org/en/the-7-principles/