Empirical work on organizations that manage com plex, potentially hazardous technical operations with a surprisingly low rate of serious incidents shows that operational safety is more than the managem ent or avoidance of risk or error. Safety so de® ned is an ongoing intersubjective construct not readily measured in terms of safety cultures, structures, functions, or other commonly used descriptors of technical or organizational attributes that fail fully to take into account collective as well as individual agency. In the cases that the author has studied, it is represented by the interactive dynam ic between operators and managers, as well as their engagement with operational and organizational conditions. The maintenance of safe operation so de® ned is an interactive, dynam ic and comm unicative act, hence it is particularly vulnerable to disruption or distortion by well-meant but imperfectly informed interventions aimed at eliminating or reducing`human error' that do not take into account the importance of the processes by which the construction of safe operation is created and maintained.
his special issue of the Journal of T Contingencies and Crisis Management marks a tuming point in the work that has become widely known as the Berkeley 'High-ReliabilityOrganizations' project.' It was, appropriately enough, 1984 when the three original participants (La Porte, Roberts and Rochlin) first joined to explore their mutual interest in studying organizations that were effectively managing and operating complex and intrinsically hazardous technical systems.Although Chemobyl and the Challenger disaster still lay in the future, Three-Mile Island had resulted in the first systematic studies of the organizational causes of accidents and errors in sophisticated technical systems, and Nomal Accidents, the founding work in the genre (Perrow, 1984). had just been published.2What brought the Berkeley colleagues together was their shared observation from three different disciplinary perspectives that the attention being paid to stuctes and cases of organizational failure was not (and still is not) matched by parallel studies of organizations that were (and are) operating safely and reliably in similar circumstances. What followed owed as much to serendipity as to planning. Among us we had reasonable acquaintance with contacts in several local-based organizations that were candidates for such a study, and whose leaders showed considerable interest in participating. From our preliminary observations, and discussions with our original contacts, we thought that the three activities-air traffic control, electric utility grid management and the operation of a US Navy aircraft carrier-had much in common. Accordingly, we brought leaders, 'managers' and supervisors of 'operations' from all three together for a number of joint workshops.All had similar challenges to maintain reliability, performance and safety, simultaneously, at very high levels and similar dependencies upon the individual and collective skills and high degree of responsibility of human operators. They posed similar conundrums for managers seeking to keep operational performance high in the face of continuing pressure to achieve higher levels of performance at lower cost without thereby increasing the risk to the organization or to the public. As the participants began to compare the three systems, it became clear that there were also remarkable similarities not only in organizational design and response, but also, once stripped of specific technical dialects, in language, modes of discourse and problem definitions.It is never easy for researchers to gain access to organizations worlung under such demanding conditions, particularly those who perceive their public and regulatory environment to be highly politicized. Fortunately for us, the combination of trust from prior relationships of long standing and the prospective benefits that began to be discussed by managers in the workshops allowed us to gain the kind of direct, intimate, observational access that few organizational researchers ever hope to achieve. Armed with a set of preliminary research questio...
Rochlin, G.I., 1989. Informal organizational networking as a crisis-avoidance strategy: US naval flight operations as a case study. Industrial Crisis Quarterly, 3: 159-176.The requirement for maintaining responsiveness and flexibility with a high degree of operational reliability and safety puts considerable demand on any organization. In the case of US Navy flight operations at sea, conditions of extraordinarily tight coupling and high technical complexity, flexible demand and uncertain environment provide more potential sources of crisis and accident than there are management personnel or permanent structures to cope with them. This paper discusses the Navy's evolved and relatively successful strategy of creating and maintaining a set of informal, evanescent, functional networks whose primary purpose is to anticipate and deflect emerging crises rather than merely react to them.
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