Training for Operational Resilience Capabilities

Resilience denotes proactive endurance and adaptability; an ability to understand and act "outside the box", anticipate and regain control that can slip , protect essential priorities, recreate controls on new premises, and learn from such experiences. De velopment of resilience calls for recognition of normal variation in the performance of underspecified work processes, conditioned by practice. Safety is still about avoiding dangerous mistakes, but also about cultivating existing adaptability. Resilience is also about the paradox of developing the ability to cope with the unexpected in a context that seeks to avoid surprise. Resilience can thus be understood as a part of an action space (safe envelope) founded on procedures, but allowing proper space for situation-driven, autonomous adaptation. The resilient margin of maneuver must be experienced operationally, but must also be supported and given a clear managerial mandate, rooted in a common management perspective and appropriate ways to articulate and calibrate it. Training is essential for resilience. TORC is a collaboration between research and industry in Norway , the Netherlands and France that aim to develop resilience as part of a safe envelope. The goal is to prepare, try and coordinate experie nces with a training that develops resilience at operational and management level, separately and together. TORC initiate a long-term process where experiences and episodes are recorded and made available for interpretation. Skills are acquired with rega rd to conveying and recognizing the crucial moments, responding in a proportionate and coordinated way, avoiding traps in the adaptation process, and actively reconcile the relationship between experienced needs and mandate of resilience. TORC is develo ped initially for normal, everyday operations, but is also considered relevant to a number of other areas such as emergency response training and development of web-based workflows.

Many industrial organizations experience that prevalent safety management approaches have reached an impasse, and that strictly compliance-oriented safety management schemes create problems by "trapping safety into rules" with respect to the potential of major accidents. Industries are therefore in need of support to transcend this "glass ceiling" and develop adaptive capabilities, without sacrificing the benefits of prevalent approaches. Resilience, described in the SAFERA T2 topic as a means of improv ing safety, is the main inspiration and navigator for the TORC concept which is designed to be a vehicle for sensitizing and developing resilience capabilities within organizations that also must accommodate the fundamental imperative of compliance to rul es and regulations. TORC will accomplish this by developing a conceptual framework describing the possibilities, interactions and implications of resilience in compliance-driven organisations with a mature rule-based safety regime, and subsequently develo p a framework for training interventions aiming for resilient capabilities. Hence, the TORC concept and framework is first and foremost directly applicable for organizations that seek to develop resilience in context (of compliance), and that recognise th at these issues have to be pursued by a community of (sharp end) operators, a community of management, as well as their combined efforts. Consolidation of resilience in context, devised in interaction with practitioners, will be a founding base for devel opment of key TORC training issues. Specific training programs derived from the TORC concept and framework will be piloted in different industries in different European countries. The experiences from these pilots will be systematized with the purpose of facilitating a broader application and calibration of the expected effects of the overall TORC concept, e.g. in terms of justified confidence in resilience.