High-reliability organizations invest in resilience

Abstract

Findings about high-reliability organizations (HRO) capture the efforts that people make, at all levels of an organization, to learn and adapt to ensure safe operations despite variability, increasing complexity, and changing risks. The HRO empirical research base shows how safety originates in the interactions between the operational and leadership activities of people. The high-reliability organization perspective is relevant in aviation because the industry has worked to systematize processes for learning from incidents and accidents. HRO also has been one contributor to the rise of Resilience Engineering which leans forward in time to make learning more proactive and, thus, management more adaptive. High Resilience Organizations focus on how people are a source of adaptive capacity that regularly defuses trouble before it becomes visible in traditional management information channels. This shifts what is informative for management. One example is monitoring how managerial decisions and activities can create difficult conflicts and tight pressures that squeeze operations in critical periods. Other key findings include: HROs do not take a record of past reliability for granted as this undermines proactive learning. HROs keep wondering why operations are successful regularly, and they see people as primarily responsible for such resilient performance. HROs consider how ongoing changes in the environment, organization, and technology change risks. These forms of information can help make safety management highly adaptive and proactive.