An Analytic Framework to Assess Organizational Resilience

Area of Science:

• Safety Science
• Systems Engineering
• Organizational Management

Background:

• Resilience engineering is crucial for managing complexity and achieving success in sociotechnical systems.
• Modern systems require resilience to handle variability, intricate work dynamics, and nonlinear interactions.
• Organizational resilience is built upon four pillars: monitoring, responding, learning, and anticipating.

Purpose of the Study:

• To define a semiquantitative analytic framework for measuring organizational resilience.
• To combine the resilience analysis grid and analytic hierarchy process for a comprehensive assessment.
• To create a structured, domain-dependent framework for evaluating resilience at various organizational levels.

Main Methods:

• Utilized the resilience analysis grid and analytic hierarchy process.
• Developed a semiquantitative framework to measure organizational resilience.
• Applied the framework to define resilience profiles and identify system strengths and weaknesses.

Main Results:

• Presented an approach to define an organization's resilience abilities.
• Created a structured framework for resilience profiling.
• Identified system weaknesses and strengths, suggesting actions to boost adaptive capacity.
• An anesthesia department example illustrated the framework's application.

Conclusions:

• The resilience analysis grid yields a weighted set of questions applicable across domains.
• This framework serves as a support tool for Safety-II oriented management.
• It facilitates integrating safety management into core organizational business.