5 Habits of Highly Reliable Organizations

It is a world after Enron. After the Global Crossing and K-Mart bankruptcies. After accusations of improprieties on Wall Street and irregularities at some of the nation's most storied professional-services firms.

It is a time when businesspeople ask, "Who can we rely on?" -- and they are asking with good cause.

The answer comes from an unexpected source: Karl E. Weick, the smartest business thinker you've never heard of. A private, academic noncelebrity who labors at the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor, Weick is revered by such public celebrities as Jim Collins and Tom Peters. And his work -- notably, the opaque but groundbreaking 1969 book, The Social Psychology of Organizing -- is among the most cited in the sphere of organizational theory.

As an organizational psychologist, Weick has studied the inner workings of everything from firefighting crews to jazz combos. In Managing the Unexpected: Assuring High Performance in an Age of Complexity (Jossey-Bass, 2001), Weick and coauthor Kathleen Sutcliffe (also from the University of Michigan) assess what's called "high-reliability organizations" -- operations such as aircraft-carrier and nuclear-power-plant crews. High-reliability organizations, or HROs, share two essential characteristics: They constantly confront the unexpected and operate with remarkable consistency and effectiveness.

In the wake of today's business turbulence and, more recently, just plain bad business, Weick's analysis of HROs offers important lessons. His message: The best way for any company -- and its people -- to respond to unpredictable challenges is by building an effective organization that expertly spots the unexpected when it crops up and then quickly adapts to meet the changed environment. In a series of interviews, Weick revealed the five habits of highly reliable organizations.

1. Don't be tricked by your success. HROs don't gloat over their successes. In fact, it's just the opposite: They are preoccupied with their failures. They are incredibly sensitive to their own lapses and errors, which serve as windows into their system's vulnerability. They pick up on small deviations. And they react early and quickly to anything that doesn't fit with their expectations.

Navy aviators often talk about "leemers," a gut feeling that something isn't right. A pilot feels puzzled, agitated, or anxious. Even though he doesn't know exactly what's wrong, he knows that he needs to abort the mission. Typically, those leemers turn out to be good intuitions: Something, in fact, is wrong.

HROs create climates where people feel safe trusting their leemers. They question assumptions and report problems. They quickly review unexpected events, no matter how inconsequential. They encourage members to be wary of success, suspicious of quiet periods, and concerned about stability and lack of variety, both of which can lead to carelessness and errors.

2. Defer to your experts on the front line. There are so many deviations out there, so much dissonance. How do we know what's really worth paying attention to? The answer: Listen to your experts -- the people on the front line.

People at the top may think that they have the big picture. More accurately, they have a picture, certainly not the picture, and certainly not bigger in the sense that it includes more data.

The picture that frontline workers see is different. It is drawn from their firsthand knowledge of the company's operations, strengths, and weaknesses. What is important about the frontline workers' view is that these people capture a fuller picture of what the organization faces and what it can actually do. In most cases, they see more chances for bold action than the executives at the top. So it's better for HROs to allow decisions to migrate to frontline expertise rather than to the top of preestablished hierarchies, where positions are often filled for reasons other than experience.

3. Let the unexpected circumstances provide your solution. I've written about the Mann Gulch fire that killed 13 smoke jumpers in 1949. In all, it was a tragic organizational failure. But what was amazing was the reaction of the foreman, Wagner Dodge, when the fire was nearly on top of his men. On the spot, he invented the escape fire -- a small fire that would consume all of the brush around him and his team, leaving an area where the larger fire couldn't burn.

He acted in a way that was contrary to all of the things that firefighters have habitually done. That's part of being resilient. Put simply, it's about having a steady head.

When something out of the ordinary happens, your stress level rises. The safest prediction for what will happen next is that your perception will narrow -- you will get tunnel vision -- and you will miss a lot of stuff. You have to be able to resist that dramatic narrowing of cues -- because within everything that is happening unexpectedly, you will find what you need for a remedy.