POWER April 2016 - 60

OPERATIONS & MAINTENANCE
Risk Management: Using
Resilience Engineering to Develop
a More Reliable Workforce, Part 2
Courtesy: Calpine
Developing a resilient organization pays benefits daily, but during outages and other
maintenance tasks, it can account for the difference between success and failure.
Beth Lay
I
n the January issue, I introduced the
concepts of highly reliable organizing
(HRO) and resilience engineering with a
promise to address the remaining principles.
As a quick review of the first article, you'll
recall that many quality and safety systems
are designed around simple work, such as on
assembly lines. However, processes aimed
solely at minimizing variability are ineffective
for the complex, highly variable work of
operating and maintaining power plants.
HRO, as described in the book Managing
the Unexpected, focuses on reducing failures
through:
■ Preoccupation with failure
■ Reluctance to simplify
■ Sensitivity to operations
■ Commitment to resilience
■ Deference to expertise
Erik Hollnagel, one of the fathers of resilience
engineering, defines resilience as " the
intrinsic ability of a system to adjust its functioning
prior to, during, or following events
(changes, disturbances, and opportunities),
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The opposite of resilient is " brittle. "
Think about how a brittle material fails:
Load increases and increases until, " snap, "
it breaks. You have little to no warning. Hidwww.powermag.com
and
sustain required operations under both
expected and unexpected conditions. "
A resilient system must be able to respond,
monitor, anticipate, and learn. It's not resilient
if it lacks any of these abilities-even if
it excels at some of them.
The first article covered the first two principles
below; this article addresses the remaining
three. To " engineer " resilient systems, we
design according to these principles:
■ Principle 1: Variability and uncertainty are
inherent in complex work.
■ Principle 2: Expert operators are sources
of reliability.
■ Principle 3: A system view is necessary to
understand and manage complex work.
■ Principle 4: It is necessary to understand
" normal work. "
■ Principle 5: Focus on what we want-to
create safety.
den flaws contribute to sudden and unexpected
failures.
Resilience is like a ductile material: Load
increases until the metal begins to deform,
at which point you remove the load and it
returns to normal shape. You've just been
warned that you are reaching the yield point;
beyond the yield point, permanent deformation
begins to occur, but you still have time to
recover before failure.
Power plant operations, including outages,
are socio-technical systems composed
of people plus technology and equipment.
We tend to focus on the equipment, jumping
into disassembly, repair and replace, and reassembly.
Yet, the other component, people,
makes or breaks system resilience.
We all have limited capacity, and when
we get stressed, we begin to miss and forget
things. During an outage, if several significant
events occur, things can begin to fail,
like a snowball rolling downhill, growing and
gathering speed. The more stressed people
are, the more things go wrong. We've all seen
outages like this.
To build resilience, we notice and moniPOWER
| April 2016
http://www.powermag.com
POWER April 2016

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