High-Reliability Organizations

Fundamentals

The scholarly understanding of HROs results from a series of careful, in-depth case studies by a group of researchers at the University of California Berkeley (Todd LaPorte, Gene Rochlin, and Karlene Roberts) who examined aircraft carriers (specifically the USS Carl Vinson ), the Federal Aviation Administration’s Air Traffic Control system (and commercial aviation more generally), and nuclear power operations (Pacific Gas and Electric’s Diablo Canyon reactor). Further research on each of these three sites included participation by Karl Weick and Paul Schulman. Later research in this tradition has examined additional HROs, including the fire incident command system, Loma Linda Hospital’s Pediatric Intensive Care Unit, and the California Independent System Operator. These diverse organizations share some key characteristics—(a) they operate in unforgiving social and political environments, (b) their technologies are risky and present the potential for (often catastrophic) error, and (c) the scale of possible consequences from errors or mistakes precludes learning through experimentation. Researchers have identified properties of HROs that are similar to other highly effective organizations, including carefully selecting employees to ensure they have the requisite interpersonal and technical skills, continual training to keep skills sharp, and frequent process audits and continuous improvement efforts. Yet other properties of HROs are more tailored to their specific challenges such as a variety of cross-checking mechanisms designed to detect errors before they occur and the development of latent networks of expertise that are activated when an HRO experiences an unexpected event. In addition, the mind-set that characterizes HROs is also unique in that it emphasizes the importance of avoiding misperceiving or misunderstanding emerging threats to reliability.

Defining high reliability has presented some challenges. In an early formulation of high reliability, Roberts proposed that high-reliability organizations are a subset of hazardous organizations that have enjoyed a record of high safety over long periods of time. Specifically, she stated that when an organization could have failed catastrophically but does not on the order of tens of thousands of times, it is an HRO. More recent treatments of high reliability have relaxed this definition in favor of arguing that high [Page 342]reliability merely indicates that some organizations must perform in a nearly error-free manner under very trying conditions, that high risk and high effectiveness can coexist, and that it takes intensive effort to achieve this. This more flexible definition has led a broader set of researchers to contribute to the literature on HROs by expanding it to include reliability-seeking organizations. Reliability-seeking organizations are not distinguished by the human and societal cost of failures but, rather, their need to manage the complexity of their task environment such that they avoid small failures amplifying into organizational mortality.

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