Jonathan Back

Cognitive Resilience

A systematic evaluation of risk reveals that a safety-critical system must have the capacity to perform outside design-base. In other words, the system should be able to behave resiliently by coping with unexpected disturbances. If people are experienced and well-trained, this is known to help foster resilience. However, the underlying repertoire of activities that allow for resilience are poorly understood.

Jonathan would best describe himself as a Cognitive Ergonomist who focuses on understanding the fit between human abilities and the limitations of the machine, task, and environment. His work is focussed on understanding how individuals recover from failure and adapt to new demands. He calls this ability “cognitive resilience”.

Jonathan's recent collaboration with practitioners in industry has highlighted the need for using a collective language to articulate knowledge of resilient practices across domains. He works with the Institute for Energy Technology (Norway) and EUROCONTROL (France). In the future he will be focussing on the medical domain and collaborating with clinicians, safety practitioners, and device manufacturers.

Refs

1. Back, J., Furniss, D., Hildebrandt, M., & Blandford, A. (2008). Resilience markers for safer systems and organisations. SAFE COMP 2008, 27th International Conference on Computer Safety, Reliability and Security, LNCS, 5219:99-112. Abstract (HTML), Pre-print (PDF)

2. Back, J., Furniss, D., & Blandford, A. (2007). Cognitive Resilience: Reflection-in-action and on-action. In R. Woltjer, B. Johansson & J. Lundberg (Eds.) Proceedings of Resilience Engineering Workshop, Vadstena, Sweden, June, 23(1), 1-6. Abstract (HTML), Pre-print (PDF)

3. Smith, P., Blandford, A., & Back, J. (in press). Questioning, exploring, narrating and playing in the control room to maintain system safety. Cognition, Technology & Work. Abstract (HTML), Pre-print (PDF)

4. Back, J., Furniss, D., Attfield, A., Hassard, S. & Blandford, A. (2009). Exploring the Importance of Reflection in the Control Room. CHI2009 - Designing for Reflection on Experience. Abstract (HTML), Pre-print (PDF)

5. Blandford, A., Back, J., Curzon, P., Li, S. & Ruksenas, R. (2006). Reasoning about human error by modeling cognition and interaction. In Proceedings of the 2nd Symposium on Resilience Engineering. Les Presses Mines Paris. pp 36-43. November. Proceedings (HTML), Pre-print (PDF).