Can team reflection of rail operators make resilience-related knowledge explicit? An observational study design

The essential resilience capabilities – monitoring, responding, learning and anticipating - have all in common the need for relevant signals and the ability to transform them into action. However, this transformation is often lacking as seen from accident analyses revealing disturbances that are either not noted or ignored in the process leading up to the undesired result. This paper proposes to focus on signals occurring because of movements from and to system boundaries and use them for team reflection. The reflection is expected to make implicit knowledge explicit, being a first step of the needed transformation to action. An observational study is designed at a rail control post where rail signal operators reflect at the end of their shift. They reflect on the punctuality boundary through an on-line application, called the Resiliencer-punctuality. The application presents delay-development of trains, during a shift, with respect to a previous chosen period. Furthermore it provides search instruments to find specific trains of interest stimulating the reflection. A verbal analysis method is used to analyze the reflection discussion and to show a relation to resilience through learning and anticipating intentions. In addition we seek for repetitive elements in different cases to prove the learning potential. The observation designed should support the hypothesis that team reflection, on movements towards boundaries, increases resilience of the rail socio-technical system