RAG

The Resilience Analysis Grid (RAG), originally developed by Professor E. Hollnagel, stems from the need to measure resilience in socio-technical systems. You can think of resilience as something that a system does (rather than something that the system has): a given system performs in a more or less resilient way depending on its socio-technical resilient potential. This latter is precisely what the RAG aims to uncover, by deconstructing resilience into a set of four cornerstones (Responding, Monitoring, Learning and Anticipating). Therefore, measuring the capabilities in relation with these four skills, it could be possible to obtain a proxy measure of resilience or - at least - of its potential.

The RAG - which in practice is characterized by a questionnaire whose answers depict a resilience profile - is a compact way of expressing these assessments through a specific spider chart that provides both measurements and a visual clue of the current status of the system. The description of the RAG provided by Hollnagel himself can be found here.

We are researching on the applicability of the RAG, but widening the method perspective acknowledging that not all the resilient performance are equally important for every system. The balance between the resilience capabilities is domain dependent (citing Hollnagel (2015), "for a fire brigade it is more important to be able to respond than to anticipate, [...] whereas for a sales organisation, the ability to anticipate may be just as important as the ability to respond").

Based on these observations, our approach aimed at modifying the RAG by the application of the AHP (Analytic Hierarchy Process, a method developed by T. L. Saaty) to superimpose an additional structure on the questionnaire. This allows us to take into account the context-specific importance of the questions with a domain-dependent perspective. Therefore, the weight structure resulting from the AHP application traces the relative importance of the survey items. A RAG questionnaire developed in for an aviation company would not be very indicative for a construction company, and even two construction companies may have different perception of what is more important to deal with the complexity of everyday work. The AHP ensures that the weighted RAG highlights correctly what really matters for the system at hand.

Our research efforts have been summarized in two academic articles, describing our research efforts in the healthcare domain.

The former article describes the RAG-AHP method, applied in the working domain of anaesthesia, by implementing it in a pilot project within an Italian hospital. The latter refines the same questionnaire and tests it on a larger sample. With its 172 respondents (from 16 different countries) it is probably the most extensive sample RAG questionnaire produced so far (2018).

Further information on theoretical foundation of the Analytical Hierarchy Process (AHP) can be found here. An operational application of the AHP and a list of lessons learnt in the aviation safety domain can be found in a research paper:


With the purpose of widening and supporting the applicability of the RAG in a number of socio-technical systems, we provide here a document of all questions for our RAG questionnaire.

Questionnaire.pdf