HRO2 Introduction to HRO

My emphasis in this blog series is on High Reliability Organizing and not on High Reliability Organizations. High Reliability Organizations are a category of organizations. High Reliability Organizing is what they do. I consider this distinction important because knowing that an organization has a record of high reliability performance doesn’t tell you much about what they learned (and how they keep learning) to get there. You can spend lots of time watching an organization and abstract general organizing principles from your observations, but you risk not understanding the context well enough to note important details about how the organization applies and adapts the principles. I think the integration and adaption of the principles of high reliability in context is not well understood, which is one of the reasons for this blog.

Most HRO research underemphasizes the processes of organizing that yield the tools people use day-to-day to enact high reliability. People can have a basic understanding of the principles of high reliability and still struggle to create tools totally consistent with them. One of the biggest challenges of HRO is connecting what people do every day to the principles. Why? Because there is no recipe for high reliability.

HRO is difficult to define succinctly. To provide more context for the definition I plan to use, I begin with the theories that were developed by observing organizations with exceptional safety records. I emphasize “observing” because researchers saw it in action first then derived theories based on their observations. I think this has important implications that I will address in future posts.

HRO research began by observing and analyzing the organizations: aircraft carriers (Rochlin, LaPorte, & Roberts, 1987), air traffic control centers (Schulman, 1993) and commercial nuclear power plants (LaPorte & Lasher, 1988). It expanded to include the study of manufacturing (Clarke & Ward, 2006); aviation (e.g., Burke, Wilson, & Salas, 2005); train operations (Jeffcott, Pidgeon, Weyman, & Walls, 2006); and fire fighting (e.g.,Bigley & Roberts, 2001; Christenson, De Grosky, Black, Fey, & Vidal, 2006).

Although my focus is on the processes of organizing that can lead to higher reliability, Rochlin’s (1993) definition of High Reliability Organizations is still useful here:

“...organisations that have not just ‘avoided’ failure through good fortune or the vagaries of probability, but … who have managed to control and reduce the risks of technical operations whose inherent hazards make them prone to join the list of classical failures. In other words, these organisations have not just failed to fail; they have actively managed to avoid failures in an environment rich within the potential for error.” (emphasis added, p. 15).

Rochlin, G.I. (1993). Defining “high reliability organizations” in practice: A taxonomic prologue. In Roberts, K. (Ed.), New Challenges to Understanding Organizations (pp. 11-32). New York: MacMillan.

There are many other definitions. The definition for my blog posts is “high reliability organizing is the practice of active management to reduce failure and enhance the reliability of human and technology systems.” The details of what constitutes that active management is context dependent because the risk, regulatory environment, as well as technical, organizational, and social structures are very different across sectors (e.g. healthcare, military, and air traffic control), organizations (different hospitals or aircraft carriers) and particular kinds of work within an organization (nurses, doctors, lab technicians, and pharmacists in a hospital).

The principal elements of HROs are:

• senior leaders engagement in details, shaping and maintaining a culture that prioritizes reliability and safety,

• centralized control of technical design and management practices,

• decentralized decision-making for operations (Bierly and Spender, 1995), and

• processes of personnel development that emphasize organizational learning from experience, training and development (Sagan, 1993).

- Bierly, P. E., & Spender, J. C. (1995). Culture and high reliability organizations: The case of the nuclear submarine. Journal of Management, 21(4), 639-656.

- Sagan, S.D. (1993). The limits of safety: Organizations, accidents, and nuclear weapons. Princeton University Press.

The training and development associated with High Reliability Organizing (HRO) includes demonstrations of skills and technical knowledge in qualifications and re-qualifications for specific roles, realistic simulations of emergencies, and frequent comparison of work in action to explicit process design (process auditing). The aim of HRO is to accomplish the mission with a culture that proactively manages safety and helps people make sense of their experience and that of others while doing it.

People engaged in High Reliability Organizing are not “error free” (Vogus, Rothman, Sutcliffe, & Weick, 2014). They can and do fail because no socio-technical system is perfect (Perrow, 1981). The U.S. Navy has had many failures including losing submarines at sea. Failures occur in organizations like Toyota, Boeing and in sectors like in commercial transportation, oil drilling, and many others. The aim of HRO is not to prevent errors, but reduce their impact. Organizations practicing HRO seek to identify, correct, learn from, update the design of human-technical systems based on operations, which always involves errors and can even include failure. The learning and updating are essential because “it is not feasible to train, design, or build in such a way as to anticipate all eventualities in complex systems” (Perrow, 1980, p. 17).

* Vogus, T. J., Rothman, N. B., Sutcliffe, K. M., & Weick, K. E. (2014). The affective foundations of high‐reliability organizing. Journal of Organizational Behavior, 35(4), 592-596.

* Perrow, C. (1981). Normal accident at three mile island. Society, 18(5), 17-26.

As originally reported by the scholars that studied it, high reliability was an outcome achieved by the organizations they studied. Roberts (1990), for example, identified them as a subset of organizations managing hazardous operations with an exemplary safety record over extended time periods. This is a focus on the organizations that do certain things. The trouble with focusing on a high reliability organization is the difficulty of defining it. What is “exemplary” or an “extended time period”? If an organization has a “failure,” however it is defined, does it cease to be reliable?

* Roberts, K.H (1990). Managing high reliability organizations. California Management Review, 32(4), 101–114.

If you want to understand high reliability organizing, focus first on the actions people take and then the thinking that supports those actions (Weick, 2006). The practices and organizational design people use for high reliability flow from the principles of High Reliability Organizing. To pursue higher reliability with zeal, organization must observe, assess, adapt, and update their practices constantly to direct attention and resources to their day-to-day problems (Christianson, Sutcliffe, Miller, & Iwashyna, 2011).

* Weick, K. E. (2006). Faith, evidence, and action: Better guesses in an unknowable world. Organization Studies, 27(11), 1723-1736.

* Christianson, M. K., Sutcliffe, K. M., Miller, M. A., & Iwashyna, T. J. (2011). Becoming a high reliability organization. Critical Care, 15(6), 314-318.

In my next post, I will explore a counterpoint to high reliability, Normal Accident Theory, which argues that serious accidents are inevitable no matter how actively you manage.