High-Reliability Organization

The High-Reliability Perspective

Individual case studies of nuclear aircraft carriers, nuclear power plants, and air-traffic control centers have been the cornerstone of the emergence of HRO research. In these organizations, reliability is not treated as a probabilistic property that can be traded off at the margins with other organizational values such as efficiency or market competitiveness. Instead, organizational design and management treat reliability in relation to occurrences that must, as nearly as possible, be deterministically prevented.

The distinctive features of these organizations as reported by high-reliability researchers, include (a) high technical competence throughout the organization; (b) a constant, widespread search for improvement across many dimensions of reliability; (c) a careful analysis of a set of core events that must be precluded from happening; (d) an analyzed set of “precursor” conditions that could leave operations a single contingency away from the precluded events or that would constitute conditions that lie outside prior analysis; (e) an elaborate and evolving set of procedures and practices that keep operations away from the zone of precluded events as well as precursor conditions; and (f) a formal structure of roles, responsibilities, and reporting relationships that can be transformed under conditions of emergency or stress into a team-based approach to problem solving. Further, these organizations develop (g) a culture of reliability under which the values of care and caution, respect for procedures, attentiveness, and individual responsibility for the promotion of safety are widely distributed among members throughout the organization. Finally, these organizations are characterized by (h) external supports, constraints, and regulations that allow for the development of the other features noted previously. The HROs analyzed so far all exist in closely regulated environments that constrain them to take reliability seriously but that also shield them from full exposure to market competition. Competitive demands would likely undermine the precluded event standard of reliability in favor of organizational strategy that would turn reliability into a “marginal” property.

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