Sherpa Alliance

These days, we must be comfortable being uncomfortable, expecting the unexpected and being ready, willing and able to manage things as they unfold.

In their 2007 book,  "Managing the Unexpected – Resilient Performance in an Age of Uncertainty", Karl Weick & Kathleen Sutcliffe put it this way:

"Most organizations experience unexpected events all the time. These dynamic and uncertain times raise the questions of how and why some organizations are much more capable than others of maintaining function and structure in the face of drastic change and of bouncing back in a stronger position to tackle future challenges. This book is based on examination of the ways people and organizations organize for high performance where the potential for error and disaster is overwhelming: nuclear aircraft carriers, air traffic control systems, aircraft operations systems, hostage negotiation teams, emergency medical treatment teams, nuclear power generation plants, continuous processing firms and wild-land firefighting crews. These diverse organizations share a singular demand: they have no choice but to function reliably. If reliability is compromised, severe harm results. We call them High Reliability Organizations (HROs), which operate under very trying conditions all the time and yet manage to have fewer than their fare share of accidents".

What can we learn from these kinds of HROs, to improve our own operations?  Here are the core principles which the authors identified, split into 2 categories:

Capacity to Anticipate "Unexpected" Problems

Capacity to Contain "Unexpected" Problems

HRO Principle 4:  Commitment to Resilience  HROs develop capabilities to detect, contain and bounce back from those inevitable errors that are part of an indeterminate world.  The hallmark of an HRO is not that it is error-free but that errors don’t disable it.  Resilience is a combination of keeping errors small and of improvising workarounds that allow the system to keep functioning.  Both these pathways to resilience demand deep knowledge of the technology, the system, one’s coworkers, and most of all, oneself.

HRO Principle 5:  Deference to Expertise  HROs push decision making down and around.  Decisions are made on the front line, and authority migrates to the people with the most expertise, regardless of their rank.  The decisions migrate around these organizations in search of a person who has specific knowledge of the event.

The authors go on to say:

"Unexpected events often audit our resilience. They affect how much we stretch without breaking and then how well we recover. Some of those audits are mild. But others are brutal. This book is about both kinds of audits, as unrecognized mild audits often turn brutal. High reliability organizations practice a form of organizing that reduces the brutality of audits and speeds up the process of recovering."