HRO1 My HRO Blog
These blog posts explore my ideas and perspective about High Reliability Organizing (HRO). All the posts in the series use the category “High Reliability” so you can select that link at the top of any post to see all the posts in the series. In all my posts, I use the initials HRO to refer to the process of “organizing” and not a particular kind of organization. Most of my posts will be less than three printed pages to make the ideas easier to digest.
You don’t have to work at an airline, a nuclear power plant, or in high-speed rail to organize your group’s activities in a highly reliable way. To practice HRO, you need a relentless focus on three things: learning, producing the highest quality output, and the success of the people actually doing the work. All your procedures, policies, staffing, and training have to align with those three things, which is much easier said than done. In the posts to follow, I plan to deconstruct and demystify the components of HRO from a different frame of reference than you usually see elsewhere. This post starts down that path.
High reliability is getting consistently good results that matter to an organization and its customers while protecting the people in it and the environment around them. This is general enough to include nuclear submarines, aircraft carrier flight decks, hospitals (lots of opportunities there according to insiders), and even donut shops. Recognizing the impracticality of organizing a small business just like a large, complex organization like a hospital or nuclear submarine, many of the principles still apply. For now, I just want readers to know that the focus of my high reliability writing is on the principles of organizing that have been observed and documented in organizations with exceptional safety records. You can model your small business on that
My views on HRO are different because I bring the perspective of an academic AND a practitioner to the topic. As an academic with a doctorate in Human and Organizational Learning, I have studied much of the research literature written about HRO by organizational scholars, management theorists, sociologists, and psychologists. I am familiar with research on leadership, human systems change, culture, and adult learning.
As a practitioner of HRO for 30 years in the Navy, I know how the Navy applied organizational theory, what “works” well, and works not so well. My understanding goes beyond research studies on high reliability because I have worked in organizations that practice HRO, some better than others. I experienced how people struggle with the practices of HRO, the new ways of thinking they must adopt, which practices are the hardest to do well, and how the practices work together as a system for improving reliability. I know what is very important to HRO practitioners but tends to get left out in the academic research.
I have worked at and evaluated organizations that executed the practices at a very high level, several that were just starting, and a few that did them poorly (that was really painful). Listing the principles of HRO is very easy compared to getting managers on board, adapting the principles to specific work contexts, getting support from regulators, and getting people to actually practice them. You can only succeed at HRO with all four in place.
My plan is to write about what I know well and describe why it is important for practitioners seeking high reliability. If there is a topic you want addressed, send me a note (see the Contact link) and I will consider writing about it. I have enabled comments in these posts because I am interested in reactions from readers.
In my next post, I discuss the origins of HRO as a field of study.
