From Crew Resource Management To Operational Resilience

This paper questions the correspondance between resilience engineering theory and the theoretical fundaments of traditional CRM training, with its related behavior assessments. Reviewing the theoretical roots of CRM it is concluded that such concepts are rather founded in the information processing paradigm hiding the complexities of adaption to rapidly changing situations. An alternative approach to team training and team performance assessment, called Operational Resilience, is introduced. Operational Resilience is rooted in complexity theory and in theorizing cognition as a distributed phenomenon. The most important principles of Operational Resilinece are the focus on processes of coordination and control rather than behaviors, analysis of emergent interactions in multi-professional settings, focus on local production of meaning instead of normative accounts of situation awareness (or similar constructions), and finally analysing how to bridge the gaps caused by the inherent system complexity instead of counting and categorizing errors. (Less)