Strategies for Identifying Resilient Behavior In Aviation

When we imagine a situation where people fly aircraft and nothing scary happens, we assume it is the system that affords this phenomenon. That is, the overall design is the cause of the success. However, this is not always true. There are many examples of how the presence of a human in the system is the reason for a successful outcome, despite flaws in the system’s design. This resilient behavior is often overlooked and challenging to characterize. In an attempt to identify this phenomenon in a generalizable way, we named and investigated two strategies, as well as identification methods, that exemplify resilient performance: 1) controls; and 2) modifications. First, controls are resilient actions in situations known to be problematic. To capture this, instead of looking at the examples of how the problem became a reality, we look at the examples of how the problem was successfully avoided or controlled. For example, a country road may have a hairpin turn where a higher-than-normal rate of accidents occur. Given that there is a likely system flaw identified, we would look at how the successful drivers navigated the turn. This can be accomplished using current safety reporting systems. Second, modifications are augmentations or changes that people create to fill in the gap between work-as-imagined and work-as-done. This type of resilient performance is directly related to poor design. In aviation, work-as-imagined is often scripted explicitly, so it can be compared to work-as-done through the use of examining system-generated data as well as narrative reports written by the system operators. These two approaches aim to identify resilient human actions to better understand how current systems function, as well as how people contribute to successes that were otherwise unknown.