Resilience Aware Development-Exploration: An Exercise for Improving Attention to Work Systems Resilience During Technology Design

Abstract

Efficiency, optimization, and improved capability are frequent goals of work system modernization initiatives. Resilience, defined as the ability of a system to adapt in response to diverse conditions and demands, including those that are rare or challenging, is also important. However, resilience is an abstract characteristic of systems. Whereas ways to improve efficiency tend to be easily recognized, ways to improve resilience are less obvious. Our goal was to make resilience visible and thereby enable developers of new technologies, concepts of operations, and policy to address and benefit the resilience of work system operations. To this end, we developed the Resilience-Aware Development—Exploration (RAD-E) that helps development teams think about how their new technology, concept of operations, or policy could impact work system resilience while educating development teams about the significance of work systems resilience and potential opportunities to strengthen the resilience of a work system.

Background

Efficiency, optimization, and improved capability are frequent goals of work system modernization initiatives. Resilience, defined as the ability of a system to adapt in response to diverse conditions and demands, including those that are rare or challenging, is also important. However, resilience is an abstract characteristic of systems. Whereas ways to improve efficiency tend to be easily recognized, ways to improve resilience are less obvious. Our goal was to make resilience visible and thereby enable developers of new technologies, concepts of operations, and policy to address and benefit the resilience of work system operations.

RAD-E

About RAD-E

To this end, we developed the Resilience-Aware Development—Exploration (RAD-E) that helps technology development teams think about how their new technology, concept of operations, or policy could impact work system resilience while educating development teams about the significance of work systems resilience and potential opportunities to strengthen the resilience of a work system.

RAD-E is one part of the Resilience Aware Development (RAD) tool suite that was built to operationalize the Transform with Resilience during Upgrades to Socio-Technical Systems (TRUSTS) framework (Neville et al., 2022; https://trusts.mep.mitre.org/) such that the work operation’s resilience is considered through the development and implementation process. The TRUSTS framework specifies capabilities and features of work systems that enable them to perform with resilience; that is, to responsively adapt to and handle novel, high demand, and other challenging conditions.

Purpose

The RAD-E is a 1-hr, moderated “systems-thinking” exercise for development teams. The goal of the RAD-E is for the development team to learn about sources of system resilience, specifically the five high-level categories of resilience sources specified by the TRUSTS Framework, and use this knowledge to collaboratively identify:

• Current or planned features, functions, and capabilities that map to each of the five categories of resilience sources

• Planned or possible features, functions, and capabilities that could contribute to each type of resilience source, that is, resilience opportunities

Conducting the RAD-E

To conduct the RAD-E, the exercise requires one facilitator, the facilitator’s script, 4 to 6 participants, and one virtual or physical RAD-E grid. Participants should be development team members and may include experts from the work domain for which the technology is being developed. The facilitator will move the participants through the exercise one high-level category of resilience sources at a time, allowing them 6 to 8 min to brainstorm ideas about how the target technology contributes or could contribute to the resilience of work system operations. Participants are encouraged to map their ideas to three concepts:

• “Resilience Inhibitors” for current or planned functionality that could interfere with a given resilience source

• “Resilience Opportunities” for currently unplanned functionality that would contribute to a source of resilience

• “Current Resilience Sources,” that is, current functionality that contributes to the resilience of work system operations

Upon the completion of brainstorming about each factor, the participants vote for which ideas are most important to this tool successfully transitioning and being used in the target work system operation. Because resilience gaps are viewed as potentially serious risks, participants are instructed to prioritize voting for “Gaps,” and secondarily for “Opportunities.”

Conclusion

It is imperative that teams learn to incorporate the factors of resilience into the development phase of their technology. Resilience allows a system to be resourceful, adaptive, and extend a its capacity to “get the job done” even during chaos. The RAD-E will allow technology development teams to recognize ways that resilience of a work system operation is currently enabled by their technology and opportunities to strengthen resilience.