Bouncing forward from global crises and challenges
Rethinking and guiding adaptations based on Resilience Engineering and Naturalistic Decision Making
“We do not know the story, even less the end of the story. What do you do in the middle of the story?“
Why?
Global crises and their reverberations and challenges, impressively exemplified by the COVID-19 pandemic, are calls for society to bounce forward. Adaptation needs are everywhere, at systemic, organisational, and societal levels, as well as at individual and community levels. It is urgent to rethink and guide innovative forms of adaptation. Together, Resilience Engineering (RE) and Naturalistic Decision Making (NDM) represent a rich source of inspiration for such adaptations.
Who?
The core of NDM is expertise in understanding and improving decision-making by practitioners in all its complexity, when things must be settled in an environment without certainty, without solid data, without magic algorithms, when it is necessary to arbitrate between conflicting goals, to choose even between diverse solutions, when time and resources are lacking.
RE is interested in understanding and improving the capacity of complex sociotechnical systems and organisations to cope with the variability of the world, including its extremes and its randomness, to adapt, thrive, take advantage of it and evolve.
NDM and RE, each at their level and on different scales, deal with arbitration, with trade-offs between knowledge and uncertainty, expertise and politics, understanding and action, specialization and diversity, thoroughness and efficiency, maneuver and margins for maneuver, recurring and exceptions, thought and unthinkable.
What?
The Naturalistic Decision Making movement and the Resilience Engineering Association have decided to open the border between the decision-making landscape and the country of resilient trade-offs, and to make their next biannual meetings (15th NDM and 9th RE) a joint event. Naturally, they decided that such a historical event deserved better than a traditional meeting.
Consequently, they foresee diverse opportunities around the world, both academic and non-academic, each of them possibly comprising working groups, regional workshops, webinars, publications for the general public, and the like. These opportunities will be progressively structured forming the content of the joint event. The event will probably be a NDM/RE discussion track, an industrial safety track, an academic young talents track, and some others. And all these tracks will get together in June 2021 during the joint meeting, and will then be able to continue their journey towards their own outcomes (publications, guidance material, methods…).
This call is therefore a call to join and propose your contributions. These can be a classic paper or presentation, but also a work in progress, a think tank, an element of a research program, a case study, a tool under development… The themes are wide open, not limited to the Covid-19 crisis – even though it presents a fantastic staging of resilience issues, and not limited to NDM’s and RE’s doxas – while they represent together a rich source of inspiration. Let’s be brave and dare to be simple: the framing question is “outmaneuvering complexity”.
The 2021 Joint meeting will be an opportunity to share all these contributions, under a format that cannot be defined yet, considering the uncertainties related to transportation, communication, and accommodation.
Where & when?
We still hope it will be possible to hold a traditional ‘physical’ meeting gathering a few hundred people. If so, it will be organized on the 21st-24th June 2021 in Toulouse, France. If not, we’ll have a backup plan, for example based on interconnected smaller regional meetings. The joint event will be co-organized and hosted by ICSI and FONCSI. ICSI is the Association for an Industrial Safety Culture, a public interest association created in France in 2003 after the AZF explosion (21st September 2001) and FONCSI is its sister research foundation, created in 2005.
Target participants: Researchers, policy makers, designers, managers and frontline operators from diverse sectors such as industry, healthcare, energy, maritime, aviation, railway, digital services, financial systems, water networks, communication, research and academia.
Take away: The Covid-19 crisis will remain as a historical moment. The main take away will be a unique opportunity to participate in a worldwide effort to make sense of it and act in it. Additionally, it will be an opportunity to network, enhance knowledge, share experiences and co-create solutions, methods, practices, and strategies.
Initial question for you to respond: What are new issues, gaps, and questions we need to think about? If we have more questions and issues than time, we will schedule additional collaborative creative process encounters!
Young talents event: One-day workshop (held on the first day of the event) for Master and PhD students within the fields of NDM or RE. During the workshop, the talents will have the opportunity to present their work to, and receive feedback from, experienced researchers and practitioners in the field. More information will follow.
Important dates June event
1 October 2020 – Registration and paper submission opens at a dedicated website for this event
29 January 2021 – Deadline for extended abstracts, workshop submissions and Young Talent program applications
26 February 2021 – Notification of review outcome
31 March 2021 – Deadline for early bird registration – Decision face to face / alternative solutions
20 April 2021 – Deadline for full paper submission
This annoucement is also available here