FRAM: The Functional Resonance Analysis Method: Modelling Complex Socio-technical Systems

by Erik Hollnagel

Resilience engineering has consistently argued that safety is more than the absence of failures. Since the first book was published in 2006, several book chapters and papers have demonstrated the advantage in going behind 'human error' and beyond the failure concept, just as a number of serious accidents have accentuated the need for it. But there has not yet been a comprehensive method for doing so; the Functional Resonance Analysis Method (FRAM) fulfils that need. Whereas commonly used methods explain events by interpreting them in terms of an already existing model, the FRAM is used to model the functions that are needed for everyday performance to succeed. This model can then be used to explain specific events, by showing how functions can be coupled and how the variability of everyday performance sometimes may lead to unexpected and out-of-scale outcomes - either good or bad. The FRAM is based on four principles: equivalence of failures and successes, approximate adjustments, emergence, and functional resonance. As the FRAM is a method rather than a model, it makes no assumptions about how the system under investigation is structured or organised, nor about possible causes and cause-effect relations. Instead of looking for failures and malfunctions, the FRAM explains outcomes in terms of how functions become coupled and how everyday performance variability may resonate. This book presents a detailed and tested method that can be used to model how complex and dynamic socio-technical systems work, to understand why things sometimes go wrong but also why they normally succeed.

160 pages, Hardcover

First published May 1, 2012

Reviews

[Emanuele Gemelli · Rating 3 out of 5]

A bit of a complex book, that rightly so, addresses complexity with the FRAM model. I am still trying to figure out how to make use of the FRAM method in an effective way; this manual, because this is what this is, gives some hints, but in typical Hollnagel's fashion is quite theoretical and maybe he should have gone much deeper into details, since, I believe, his readers are not the casual ones. It's not a spoiler to say that one should start reading the last two chapters of the book, where the Author compares three investigation models (not methods, which Hollnagel is very keen to point out) with the FRAM, giving, I believe, the best explanation why one should use the method if she wants to capture the complexities of socio-technical organisations in a non-judgemental and non biased way; in other words, using a method, the FRAM, that addresses the WAD instead of the WAI, which is the way to go, IMHO. Useful, but limited