This work describes the development and implementation of a controlled study into the way users form and utilise resilience strategies to overcome threats to performance. Despite a carefully considered design, participants demonstrated creative and unanticipated strategies to overcome deliberately ‘designed-in’ challenges in our task, thus circumventing the errors and responses we had predicted. We discuss the variety of unanticipated resilience strategies we observed during the course of this study, as well as methodological lessons learned as a result. Furthermore, we describe a forthcoming study which seeks to build upon the initial investigation, utilising a revised task paradigm to address and overcome its limitations.