Towards a Worker-Centered Framework for Categorizing Procedural Adaptations
A three-phase study at a petrochemical company in the southern United States, run from 2019 to 2024, that sets out a vocabulary for procedural work that succeeds. Ashraf, Peres and Sasangohar start from an imbalance: safety science has detailed taxonomies of failure, such as Reason's slips, lapses, mistakes and violations, but little language for the adaptations that let work succeed. Hard-hat cameras recorded 14 experienced operators filling rail cars or trucks with chemicals, and three coders compared 1,422 procedural steps with the written procedures: 32.9% departed from them in some way, yet every observed task was completed successfully. Experts' interpretations of these variations, checked in 2024 against the observed work and explanations of four other operators, produced the RES framework, whose three categories carry phrases the workers used unprompted: routine adaptations (the way things are done), efficiency adaptations (work smarter not harder) and safety adaptations, which add checks the procedure does not require (trust but verify). The categories are not mutually exclusive, but workers consistently emphasised one primary function when explaining their reasoning.
Terms such as violation, non-compliance and deviation, they argue, obscure the potential benefits of many adaptations; not every adaptation makes work safer, but treating departures from procedure as errors stops organisations learning from the expertise the adaptations show (citing Tucker and Edmondson, 2003). Offered as shared language for frontline workers, supervisors, safety professionals and procedure designers, the framework could help shift conversations from blame towards learning and encourage workers to share adaptive expertise rather than conceal deviations, though they note its effectiveness in practice is yet to be evaluated. This is where it meets psychological safety, a term the paper does not use. The limits are stated: one company and one kind of operation, and cameras that may have changed behaviour, possibly leading to under-reporting of adaptations workers might see as non-compliant. RES is put forward as a theoretically grounded hypothesis needing testing across contexts, not a universally validated taxonomy.
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