Could this Happen Again? A Resilience Engineering View of a NASA Event

Elizabeth Lay, Former Head of Human Performance, Calpine delivers a presentation around “Could this Happen Again? A Resilience Engineering View of a NASA Event”

Roughly four years ago, Luca, an astronaut from Italy, nearly drowned during a spacewalk after a potentially dangerous amount of water accumulated in his helmet.   After this event, NASA performed a traditional root cause analysis and implemented corrective actions.  Then NASA asked “Could this happen again?

Looking to resilience engineering to provide a different perspective, International Space Station leadership commissioned a team to assess and make recommendations to increase the resilience of their organization.  In this talk, Elizabeth reported on elements the team deemed relevant in assessing resilience and brittleness.

ABOUT ELIZABETH LAY
Currently working with NASA on a project to improve organizational resilience for the International Space Station organization. Led team from the Department of Energy to assess Human Performance and Operational Leadership processes and practices at Los Alamos National Labs and provided guidance to take their programs “to the next level”. Lead learning teams, staff rides, workshops on resilience engineering / HRO, human performance, operations risk management, sacrifice decisions, and situation awareness. Led implementation of human performance for a large power plant operations company that integrated with a traditional safety system. Developed a operations risk management program for large field service organization. Invented “Rapid / Real Time Risk Assessment” to manage emergent risks, a process which brings together knowledge from a distributed group within 1 hr of being requested. Recognized as a global best practice by Siemens. She has a Bachelor of Mechanical Engineering (BSME) degree and a graduate certificate in Cognitive Science.

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