Making resilience explicit in FRAM: shedding light on desired outcomes

Resilience plays a key role in desired outcomes of socio-technical systems. However, the Functional Resonance Analysis Method (FRAM), which has been the main modeling tool in light of resilience engineering, does not make explicit the role of resilience. This paper addresses this gap by proposing new procedures for the development of FRAM models of desired outcomes. They are: (i) the active search for functions that display resilient performance; (ii) the assessment of the frequency at which the function output is expected to occur at the same way as it occurred in the desired outcome – frequent unwanted variabilities that occur despite desired outcomes tend to be hidden; (iii) understanding of the reasons for desired outcomes based on the analysis of the logical associations between each function, the abilities of resilient systems and guidelines for coping with complexity; and (iv) the proposal of recommendations for sustaining the observed successful performance. Two case studies of events with desired outcomes in an intensive care unit illustrate the applicability of the proposal. The proposal is expected to be useful for making systems more resilient to everyday work, in which vulnerabilities might be hidden by desired outcomes.