Reliable Organizations: Present Research and Future Directions

Abstract

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...

Managing risks through ISO 31000: A critical analysis

“…According to its proponents, the HRO (High Reliability Organizations) model has proven itself in various sectors ( Laporte, 1994 ;Rochlin, 1996 ;Weick and Suncliffe, 2007 ), particularly in high-security industries ( Leveson et al , 2009 ) such as aerospace, air traffi c control, aircraft carriers in US naval bases and power plant commissioning ( Rochlin et al , 1987 ). Senior management ' s commitment to promoting a culture of safety and their concern for the continual improvement of risk management plans and processes are two principles set out in the HRO model that are in accord with both the spirit and letter of the ISO 31000 standard.…”

A Systematic Review on High Reliability Organisational Theory as a Safety Management Strategy in Construction

“…Casler., 2014; USA [36] HROs are organisations that operate potentially hazardous technical systems under very demanding conditions, while maintaining a level of performance and safety far above what might be expected [49].…”

“…There is an evidence of some similarities in definitions [37,38,41,46,[48][49][50], in which a common context of hazardous and complex working environment is used to define HRO. Other definitions [42,46,51] suggested HRO to be nearly error and accident-free.…”

Towards the Comprehensive Design of Energy Infrastructures

“…A typical example would be the choice of reinforcing existing grids or utilize storage capacity to handle daily load fluctuations or the intermittency effect of renewables. Regarding reliable operations, the nature of coordination, the use of computerized monitoring systems, routines and emergency procedures, preventive maintenance and managerial strategies are key design options [41][42][43][44][45]. In this literature, the choice for more top-down or bottom-up means of control is a frequent point of discussion.…”