From Myopic Coordination to Resilience in Socio-technical Systems. A Case Study in a Hospital

Abstract

In socio-technical systems, the overall functioning requires, by definition, a coordination of actions and decisions of the different agents involved in the task. It seems reasonable to assume that the resilience capacity in such systems therefore also should require the coordination of local and spontaneous coping strategies distributed in time and space to recover from surprise, unexpected events or crises. Indeed, the history of accident investigations contains many instances of dramatic coordination failures. The purpose of this chapter is to show why the study of coordination mechanisms is so crucial to the resilience of socio-technical systems. We illustrate this importance using an example from one kind of socio-technical system, a health care system. First, we introduce the concept of coordination as a component of resilience in socio-technical systems like hospitals and show how they handle coordination requirements. Then, we describe how practitioners adapt to the unexpected using emergent coordination mechanisms. We conclude by developing our main argument that resilience of socio-technical systems largely depends on their ability to project themselves outside the ‘local immediate’ when an unexpected event arises in order to be able to develop a coordinated spatio-temporal solution.