This is a very brief summary of research on educational design principles to develop training and non-technical skills, with the aim of increasing capacity for organisational resilience.
Even if you’re critical of the contemporary resilience perspective, the concept of scenario-based training and simulations isn’t new and thus, this paper may still be of interest.
Proposed are four resilience-oriented principles:
1. Encourage mimetic experiences: This training contains relevant components of high-risk activity but does not fully simulate real-life work. They suggest simulations, mimicking & story-telling in order to stimulate an experience that’s “similar but not reducible to another experience, with simultaneous feeling of sameness and difference” (p10).
They cite an example of how mimetic experiences were use with novice nurse anaesthetists, which helped to create simulations that “amplified their expectations and interpretations of the simulated scenarios”. Further, it’s noted that training scenarios should maintain “mimetic links” with the targeted work conditions, that is being both formal and functional, but also introducing elements of miming, feigning, role playing, narratives, stories. It’s said that “These properties are likely to foster the actors’ creativity and productive imagination” (p10).
2. Pay attention to attention & concernedness: This seeks to facilitate operators’ attentiveness to situational details rather than being about mere concentration. Being on lookout for failure, how actions affect outcomes and processes, what maintains reliable performance. It’s said a key goal is to develop scenarios that allow operators to tap into these signals and to be “ready without necessarily being active” (p10).
They cite an example of a virtual simulation in an inquiry-led training situation where a nuclear plant novice operator becomes aware of configurational details of the reactor building.
3. Perturbation-based training: This is an element I think is really interesting. This helps operators face obstacles, peculiar situations, cope with stressful/new events & overcome critical issues. It involves operators working through a critical situation & sensemaking based on some limited cues.
An example is security agents in a terrorist attack scenario learning to work through event with the fake news of a colleague’s death; designed to induce shock & disruption and prompt the trainees to find ways to keep working efficiently with impacts to their concentration and cognitive resources. It’s said that this type of training “allows a circular movement between “hazard” events (unexpectedly disturbing and disrupting the flow of work) and “rendezvous” events during training sessions (aiming at reconsidering past events and/or considering future potential events)” (p11); enacting new forms of activity which has been called abduction.
[Another study unrelated to this one used a similar method with field linespeople, and had them respond to an emergency power situation and the trainers then removed some key pieces of information or equipment that the team normally uses and had them problem solve the situation.]
4. Support participatory-sensemaking and collective sensemaking: this element involves creating training situations that supports interactions, info sharing and joint sensemaking. It’s said to involve (p11):
- Using structured debates & controversies relating to the work activity, involving both rule-based and managed safety
- Promoting a reluctance to simplify interpretations and emphasising a deference to expertise.
It’s said that “Such constructive debates are likely to occur through proscriptive, inquiry-led exercises, in which “what is not forbidden is allowed” (whereas in most of usual training schemes, “what is not allowed is forbidden” (p11).
They cite an example that following some crew resource management training, particular attendees reported on a better understanding of others’ knowledge, work constraints and prospective ideas because of the facilitated sensemaking activities.
Authors: Simon Flandin, Germain Poizat, Marc Durand, 2018, Development and Learning in Organizations
Study link: https://doi.org/10.1108/DLO-03-2017-0027
Link to the LinkedIn article: https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/improving-resilience-high-risk-organizations-design-ben-hutchinson
SafetyInsights.org 