by Priscila Wachs
This year, I was approached by an undergraduate student (Eduardo Schneider) who wanted to develop his senior project under my supervision. We had a first meeting, talked about some options and the idea about developing TORC (Training for Operational Resilience Capabilities) for the company he was working came up. This was a challenge for Eduardo, since it was the first time he was talking and reading about TORC.
Note: if you are interested in knowing more about TORC, check out the REA webinar Training for Operational Resilience Capabilities, presented by Tor Olav Grøtan.
The company Eduardo works for is a subscription book club that has over 50,000 subscribers. Each month, subscribers receive a surprise kit (bookmark, slipcase, book, and magazine about the month’s book). In order to develop the training materials, Eduardo conducted interviews to surface what challenging situations the operation managers face that require that they (and their team) possess resilience capabilities. The interviews were done using the Critical Decision Method approach. The critical situations that arose were related to the arrival schedule of the kit components from suppliers. They have a tight schedule to package the kit components and send the kit to the costumers and, since the content of the kit is a surprise, all the costumers need to receive them at the same period of time.
When we first thought about TORC and the theory behind it (namely, Resilience Engineering), we were thinking in terms of a safety management situation. However, since the critical situation presented by the interviewees were different than that, we adapted the use of TORC. And it went pretty well! The gamechangers were related to the delay of the suppliers and also to some product damage. The participants needed to make decisions, develop strategies they were going to adopt and identify resources they were going to use. And still at the and the end of each round they discussed about safety, mental workload and efficiency. We had rich discussions.
It was an exciting experience!
The author can be contacted at wachs.priscila@gmail.com