Managing the Unexpected: Assuring High Performance in an Age of Complexity
Managing the Unexpected: Assuring High Performance in an Age of Complexity
Karl E. Weick and Kathleen M. SutcliffeJossey-Bass£17.05ISBN: 0-7879-5627-9
High reliability organisations (HROs) manage the unexpected through five processes:
- 1.
preoccupation with failures rather than successes;
- 2.
reluctance to simplify interpretations;
- 3.
sensitivity to operations;
- 4.
commitment to resilience; and
- 5.
deference to expertise, as exhibited by encouragement of a fluid decision-making system.
Taken together these five processes produce a collective state of"mindfulness". This state combines a rich awareness of discriminatory detail and an enhanced ability to discover and correct errors before they escalate into potential - or actual - crises. The authors offer a basic, though useful,questionnaire to identify the state of each process within your own organisation. Each chapter ends with a valuable summary of the main points.
The final chapter attempts to "move things on" by providing a number of relevant ideas "to build competence to contain or bounce back from inevitable problems, once they become evident". Such ideas include the notions that:
ambivalence builds resilience;
use rich media and encourage people to listen;
be mindful publicly;
enlarge competencies and response repertoires;
build excess capacity;
create flexible decision structures;
accelerate feedback;
balance centralisation with decentralisation; and
reinforce perishable values and mitigate complacency.
The presentation might be more suitable for those used to academic texts but this is worth reading by a wider audience.
