FRAM Part 2: Functions
Attempting to model complex things is fraught with peril. I’m going to explain my understanding of one method for doing so called Functional Resonance Analysis (FRAM), introduced by Professor Erik Hollnagel some years ago and described in this book. I’m writing to an audience not already steeped in the sort of safety research fields where Prof. Hollnagel made his name. It’s also meant to be informative, not exhaustively (or performatively) rigorous.
Shall we see if it’s a useful way of looking at our ever-more-complex world?
This is Part 2. The other parts will be linked below:
- FRAM Part 1: Ignorance
- FRAM Part 2: Functions (you are here)
- FRAM Part 3: Hexagons
Today we will cover the foundation principles (last time was about context) and we’ll be set up to start an analysis of our own by Part 3.
Emergence and Resultance
Emergence, as defined previously, is “behavior that arises not from any given piece or component in a system, but from interactions between them”. FRAM assumes the existence of emergence and is intended to “catch” it as part of the analysis — unlike most component based methods. We want to know how the system plays out when it is alive and moving.
Humans are prone to narratives though (you’re reading one!) and so what we often are drawn to are resultant outcomes — ones which can be attributed to component failures. To reject resultant explanations is to reject linear causality as an inappropriate as a method of analysis.
Failures = Successes
When we look back and analyze “what went wrong”, we usually don’t treat the actions that lead to failure the same way we treat the ones that lead to success (or normal operation). They are more egregious, or more sinister, or more deliberate, or more unusual, or more something. Yet, in reality, success and failure are achieved in the same way: by functions doing things and outputting…
