An analytic framework to assess organizational resilience

Background: Resilience engineering is a paradigm for safety management that focuses on coping with complexity to achieve success, even considering several conflicting goals. Modern sociotechnical systems have to be resilient to comply with the variability of everyday activities, the tight-coupled and under- specified nature of work, and the nonlinear interactions among agents. At organizational level, resilience can be described as a combination of four cornerstones: monitoring, responding, learning, and anticipating. Methods: Starting from these four categories, this article aims at defining a semiquantitative analytic framework to measure organizational resilience in complex sociotechnical systems, combining the resilience analysis grid and the analytic hierarchy process. Results: This article presents an approach for defining resilience abilities of an organization, creating a structured domain-dependent framework to define a resilience profile at different levels of abstraction, and identifying weaknesses and strengths of the system and potential actions to increase system’s adaptive capacity. An illustrative example in an anesthesia department clarifies the outcomes of the approach. Conclusion: The outcome of the resilience analysis grid, i.e., a weighed set of probing questions, can be used in different domains, as a support tool in a wider Safety-II oriented managerial action to bring safety management into the core business of the organization.