Can weak-resilience-signals (WRS) reveal obstacles compromising (rail-)system resilience?

Analysis of accidents in socio-technical systems frequently reveals unnoticed obstacles, which have grown to become the main cause of incubation and surprise at failure (Dekker, 2011). Thus far, it has proven to be a challenge to identify those unnoticed obstacles upfront among the tremendous number of events occurring during normal operations. In this article, we describe the usage of weak resilience signals (WRS) (Siegel & Schraagen, 2014), at a rail control post, to reveal obstacles compromising the resilience state of the system. Resilience is defined as the ability of a complex socio-technical system to cope with unexpected and unforeseen disruptions (Hollnagel, Woods, & Leveson, 2006). The WRSs, developed and presented around three system boundaries: safety, performance and workload, are used to stimulate a state of mindfulness (Weick & Sutcliffe, 2007) revealing unnoticed obstacles. An observational study is proposed to verify exposure of obstacles and their impact on rail-system resilience. The WRS and its stimulus to rail traffic controllers are expected to contribute to a higher rail operation reliability.