What knowledge, strategies and practices do we have at hand to respond in a flexible manner to COVID-19? Lessons learned from Resilience Engineering and Societal Resilience
April 20
By Vanessa Becker Bertoni
The speakers Martina Ragosta (Italy), Johan Bergström (Sweden), and Tarcisio Saurin (Brazil) shared their perceptions on how the resilience engineering (RE) community can make sense of the COVID-19 pandemic and contribute to the mitigation of its impacts. The presentations had the intention of raising questions and encourage critical thinking from a RE lens.
Dr. Ragosta´s talk highlighted the impacts of the pandemic on the aviation industry. According to Dr. Ragosta, the European Commission applied a coordinated temporary 30-day restriction of non-essential travel from third countries into the EU. The restriction has been adopted by all EU Member States (except Ireland) and all Schengen Associated Countries (Iceland, Liechtenstein, Norway, and Switzerland), as an attempt to contain the spread the virus. Then it has been extended to all Member States and non-EU Schengen countries until May 15th. Due to the interconnectedness of the aviation industry, the temporary restrictions have a far-reaching impact, directly affecting the whole Air Traffic Management (ATM) system, including airlines, airports, Air Aviation Service Providers (ANSPs), regulatory entities and agencies. This will result in a drastic reduction of passengers and lost revenues in 2020 for the global aviation industry. From a RE lens, the pandemic makes clear that the industry was not ready to face this situation as an integrated system. Indeed, each country responded to the threat on it owns terms by closing their borders, and trial and error approaches for solving problems on the fly. It took a while before stakeholders started sharing lessons working together to adapt their resources and capabilities to face this threat.
Dr. Bergström explored interactions between societal levels as a manifestation of resilient performance. In order to discuss how ordinary citizens have been engaged in the control of the pandemic, he raised the question of whether the measures promoted by governments for coping with the pandemic have been implemented as empowerment or responsibilisation of citizens. Based on Clarke (2005), Dr. Bergström defined empowerment as providing voices and choices, and giving citizens the necessary resources to cope with the pandemic. In turn, the speaker referred to responsibilisation as asking citizens to take the responsibility to manage or avoid the threat without having the necessary resources to do so. At the national level, in many countries, the adaptive measures seem to be more authoritarian than democratic. However, it is too early to conclude which adaptive strategy, authoritarian or democratic, which seems the most effective in managing the pandemic.
Dr. Bergström also offered the viewpoint that resilience may be interpreted as a neoliberal approach that seeks to share accountability with individuals instead of relying on centralized forms of risk management and protection. He noted that Sweden’s response to the pandemic could be seen as an example of a neoliberal resilience approach; it trusts that citizens will do the right thing and take care of themselves and each other without being forced by the State. He also provided practical examples of more meso-level adaptive strategies, such as building new healthcare facilities to those who need treatment, and reallocating supplies to where they are needed. Lastly, the speaker reinforced Dr. Ragosta’s feeling that we are all facing the consequences of not being appropriately prepared for the outbreak.
In the last portion of the webinar, Dr. Saurin offered a reflection of how complexity thinking can help us to make sense of the pandemic. He highlighted the fact that many work practices that seemed impossible before the pandemic became a reality overnight. The large scale and widespread adaptations that have occurred across healthcare systems and elsewhere poses a unique opportunity to advance the RE body of knowledge. His talk also stressed the dual role played by complexity in the pandemic: while complexity has contributed to the rise of the pandemic, it has also played a role for coping with the pandemic and will eventually contribute to its end. For example, some features of complex systems, such as trade-offs and dynamic interactions, contributed to the amplification and spread of the pandemic. The management of the trade-off between safety and efficiency (i.e. social distancing vs. reopening businesses) is also at the core of the mitigation of the impacts of the pandemic. All these features have played out across the several scales of complex systems, thus showing the fractal nature of the pandemic. Based on his previous RE research (Bueno et al., 2019), Dr. Saurin presented five guidelines for coping with complexity, and presented examples of how these have been deployed so far. The guidelines are: take advantage of diverse perspectives when making decisions; provide slack; give visibility to processes and outcomes; understand work-as-done; and monitor unintended consequences.
References
Bueno, W. P., Saurin, T. A., Wachs, P., Kuchenbecker, R., & Braithwaite, J. (2019). Coping with complexity in intensive care units: A systematic literature review of improvement interventions. Safety Science, 118, 814-825.
Clarke, J. (2005). New Labour’s citizens: activated, empowered, responsibilized, abandoned? Critical Social Policy, 25(4), 447-463. doi:10.1177/0261018305057024
Vanessa Becker Bertoni is a PhD student at the Federal University of Rio Grande do Sul (Brazil), Industrial Engineering and Transportation Post-Graduation Program