Capturing Variations of Successes From Failure Events to Entrench Resilient Performance Identification

Resilient individual and organizational performance is akin to the boxing rope-a-dope technique. The purpose of adopting this technique is to lean on the boxing rope to increase the distance between oneself and the opponent on attack to reduce the impact of the punches. Similarly with individual and organizational resilient performance, sometimes success is not only about avoiding a problem (anticipation), improving a current state or minimizing the loss and risk (coping) but of restoring a performance potential (adaptation). This distinction is often buried when we analyze events and consider outcomes as either a failure or success. What may count as success is contingent on the situation and there is the need to broaden the perspective by which we assess individual and organizational outcomes as successes or failures. We propose and highlight how redefining organizational outcomes, from the dominant, either failure-or-success approach, to an approach that highlight various forms of human agency in coping and adaptation will enrich our understanding of organizational issues. We raise this discussion and illustrate our approach using incidents drawn from the nuclear industry event reports revealing successes embedded in evident failure events. This speaks to the need to recognize resilient capabilities, when displayed during organizational events.

Keywords: Learning from events, Learning from failures and success, Resilience capabilities, Nuclear power plants, Licensee event reports.