Customer Reviews

Managing the Unexpected: Assuring High Performance in an Age of Complexity

5 star:		(12)
4 star:		(4)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(2)

 

 

I have read and enjoyed several of Weick's books and articles on organizational performance. For the most part, they were difficult, but insightful works on how people in organizations behave. But it was not easy to translate the insights I gleaned from Weick's work into tools and strategies to improve the performance of the organization which employs me (a small hospital).

In Managing the Unexpected, Weick and coauthor Sutcliffe have written a short book that summarizes the insights gained from studying high reliability organizations (HROs) and details "doable" strategies to enable other organizations to improve their own reliability. The book's use of several case studies, detailing of key strategies and techniques, and chapter summaries make it a quick and interesting read. What is most valuable, though, is that a person working in an HRO, or an organization that should aspire to such a status, can immediately take the techniques and strategies detailed in the book and start to use them to improve the organization's performance and reliability.

Despite the fact that this book offers concrete strategies to improve organizational performance, it admits right from the start that successful HROs are extremely complex organizations. The authors allow the reader to appreciate that the success of these organizations in delivering quality products and services under often adverse circumstances is due to cadres of employees with diverse perspectives, skills, and expertise, that respect the complexity of the organization, and are willing to allow important decisions to be made by the individuals with the greatest understanding of the current situation.

Thus, although Managing the Unexpected provides concrete tools and strategies for improving organizational performance, it also emphasizes the importance of mindfulness for employees working in HROs, or organizations endeavoring to such status. Mindfulness includes working constantly to be aware of the complexity of the organization, its environment, and that our expectations and plans for the future may be erroneous. This emphasis on mindfulness and disciplined awareness makes the reader aware that although the tools and strategies presented by the authors may seem simple, to be effective they must be used by individuals who have worked diligently to understand their organization, its employees, and the organization's environment.

Managing the Unexpected is a welcome book for those of us who have always marveled at the success of our organizations in delivering quality goods and services in chaotic environments. It is not a quick fix that will send you to organizational nirvana with mindless platitudes. No, it is more like an organizational Leatherman that you keep on your belt at all times with the understanding that successful complex organizations are always needing to be fine tuned with a wide variety of skills, tools, and awareness.

Karl Weick and Kathleen Sutcliffe have written an eloquent and practical guide to reliability and safety that emphasizes the managerial point of view, but is also equally helpful to researchers or safety professionals. Perhaps the greatest thing the authors are able to accomplish in this book is in emphasizing the conscious mindfulness required in critical situations, and in distinguishing in observable and real-world ways the specific components of mindfulness as seen in safety-conscious High Reliability Organizations (HROs).

The authors distill the essence of reliability (and safety) into five essential qualities: preoccupation with failure, reluctance to simplify, sensitivity to operations, commitment to resilience, and deference to expertise. As a long time safety professional (with experience largely in the aviation and chemical processing industries) I couldn't agree more with the authors after reading the text associated with these five qualities. I have found that especially in larger organizations that deference to expertise is perhaps the most difficult of the five traits to be accepted in the workplace, as generally rank or seniority tend to be deferred to, particularly in a crisis. The airline industry has come a long way with the different iterations of Crew Resource Management (CRM), and of all (often unstated) the reasons that CRM has succeeded I think that deference to expertise is the single most important.

I like the concept of realistic audits the authors promote, and particularly enjoyed the insight regarding the vulnerability of Singapore to Japanese attack as it came to be understood by Winston Churchill, who had a penchant for realistic self-appraisal, to wit: "I ought to have known. My advisors ought to have known and I ought to have been told, and I ought to have asked." The point is that we frequently believe what we want to believe, not because we are intellectually dishonest, but because of the human tendency to seek out information that confirms our views, and not to seek out disconfirming information. A mark of a truly reliable and safe organization (examples include airline operations, nuclear power plants, aircraft carriers, etc.) is seeking out information which points toward problem areas, rather than viewing successes as being demonstrative of the quality of institutional planning and procedures. The example concerning the Moura mine disaster on p.135 makes the point quite eloquently: "HROs assume that the system is endangered until there is conclusive proof that it is not." There could be no better single- sentence summary of the book.

There are many more interesting observations in the book, the most enlightening of which can be found in chapter five. I particularly enjoyed the discussion of a "learning culture" beginning on p. 136, and find that one of their most salient observations is also one of mine from years of industry experience, that being the concept of "learned helplessness." When people attempt to bring safety issues to the fore but are quickly dismissed, they learn to keep to themselves. This is a major problem, especially in large organizations, and the advice proffered by the authors is both sound and cogent. I was absolutely delighted to see the long-overdue examination (p.140) of "de minimus error" in which context is examined as it relates to seemingly unconnected small events. In this situation, people frequently seek out separate, small reasons for each deviation, ignoring the accumulating evidence that there is actually one large problem responsible for all the disparate events. Though the authors did not note it as an example, people familiar with the Apollo 13 accident will no doubt realize how the controllers had to fight off this kind of error willfully. (I think that Apollo-era NASA was an excellent example of an HRO.)

There are many more issues that Weick and Sutcliffe bring to the forefront in this book, from intelligent rule-making, to flexibility of response. My advice to any manager or safety professional is to put this book at the top of your reading list. It is easy to read, easy to digest, comprehensive in scope, yet universally applicable across industries. Even if you are not involved in an industry like nuclear power or aviation where large issues of life and death are literally in your domain, this is still mandatory reading. Any business can learn for the examples cited (which range from a merger-induced railroad meltdown at the "bad" end of the reliability scale, to nuclear-powered aircraft carrier operations at the "good" end of the reliability scale.)

I highly recommend this book to managers, safety professionals, researchers, and anyone else interested in becoming more informed about reliability and organizational safety.

This book is about learning to "notice the unexpected in the making and halt its development." In other words, it shows the reader how to detect surprises while they are new, small, and insignificant and before they become five-alarm fires. The book shows the reader how to create what the authors call a high-reliability organization that can deal effectively with surprises. An organization does this by being "mindful," which is to say alert, resilient, and flexible. What could be more perfect for today's executives?
Weick and Sutcliffe also provide clear guidance on how to implement their advice, but the reader should be warned that doing so is tough. Most bosses don't want to be bothered with a) "insignificant" developments b) news about near misses c) inquiry into gray areas that cannot be resolved quickly and cleanly, and d) reflections on efforts that failed or nearly failed. Few organizations truly defer to expertise rather than to rank. Few bosses devote time to exploring isolated events that may have subtle relationships connecting them. All of these cultural characteristics resist the implementation of mindfulness.
This book is helpful in part because the authors articulate complicated ideas in a clear and condensed way. They give us words and phrases that we can actually use at work. It is also useful because the book draws on real life examples of mindful organizations and of others that paid the price for not being mindful. I count this book among the top dozen or so business and management books I have read over the years, and I have read many of them. It is outstanding.

Drs Weick and Sutcliffe provide a very readable presentation of a complex subject. Geared towards the business audience (but also a good introduction for researchers), it provides a clear outline of the underlying issues in managing complex organizations as well as concrete methods for transforming your organization into one capable of dealing with uncertainty.

I fully agree with the importance of this topic and any organization and individuals got to think of unexpected events in our life, however, the story went far from what I was hoping.
Overall I can summarize what this book say in three points and nothing more.
1) Do not ignore small signs leading big failure
2) Be open to bad news
3) Create culture to share bad experience and not to blame those who made mistakes
I agree with all of them but I wanted to hear HOW to make them happen. The authors tell you just to be mindful and repeat this message in the entire book.
The problem in real world is that we have been exposed to overwhelming amount of information. Most of them are nuisance but a few of them are critical to lead you to success or miserable failure. As a leader in organization, he needs to find out which signal is the real diamond. This book does not explain how to find it. You cannot afford to be mindful to all the signals you receive in a single day.
Imagine that you can apply authors' logic to any past event. The project A failed. Why? Because the team was not mindful to the sign of failure, such and such.
An unexpected event happens because things went differently from your premises, by its definition. So when it happens, you need to go back to the original premise and find out what was wrong in it. In the Union Pacific incident case in the book, the cost cutting effort eroded the level of safey design until it comes to the threshold of the system disruption. The wrong premise was that they believed that they can keep cutting cost forever without causing system failure. As a senior level leader, his action should be to create a role or department to counter-balance to such activity, conceivably giving higher authority to the safety department. And I believe this should not be attributed to workers and mid-managers level as a root cause. "Culture" is a very attractive word which many people want to jump to as this book did, however, it is a reflection of top management. Changing culture is a consequence of some actions. It cannot be objective by itself.
Alternatively, I would propose to approach this topic like this;
1) Record unexpected event in your life
2) Analyze what went differently from the initial thought and calibrate your goal periodically
If you do this, you will have a sort of a database about your "Unexpected". This will be your great improvement source since it tells you about your traits of thinking. Same for organization. That will give you much better insight how to handle YOUR unexpected event.

Weick and Sutcliffe have accomplished the rarest of feats - they have created a book that suggests a viable research agenda for scholars and has tremendous practical relevance for managers. Their approach is also decidedly process-based and suggests different routes to high performance through capabilities for anticipating and detecting the unexpected as well as for resilience and managing the unexpected, which offers a nice contrast to more static and structure-based frameworks. Weick and Sutcliffe breathe life into these processes through rich and varied case examples. Another extremely appealing feature of the book is (Chapter 4 - Assessing Your Capabilities for Assured Performance) its attempt to measure these processes through various "audits." While these measures are only suggestive, they provide academic and practitioner alike with a great reference point for developing their own instruments. Chapter 6 offers a number of sound recommendations delivered with punch for the manager attempting to apply the principles of the book. The book also has significant implications for human resource management practitioners and scholars as it suggests a new way for designing human resource practices (e.g., training) and a new set of mechanisms (i.e., mindfulness) by which these practices may lead to improved performance. All in all, an insightful, provocative, and cogent book.

Weick and Sutcliffe provide exceptional insights into high reliability organizations (HROs) and how lessons learned from HROs can be applied to other organizations that are not satisfied with just being good. The authors address the five hallmarks of mindfulness that distinguish HROs from all other organization types. The authors provide detailed checklists through which company leaders can audit and assess organizational readiness for dealing with unexpected events. The authors address the critical value of organizational culture in dealing with unexpected events and how organizational leaders can build the capacity to "manage mindfully". The text is well-documented and well-indexed. Each of the six chapters is summarized for rapid review; however, with ony 173 pages of substantive text, this "must read" can be completed in only a few hours. Knowledgeable leaders who are interested in creating resilient organizations should also read Ian Mitroff's "Crisis Leadership" (John Wiley & Sons) as an accompanying text.

After having just read this book then signing on to see the reviews, I was surprised to see the intensity of the three negative, "outlier" reviews. I am an old, 4-year post-doc with over 30 years experience as a practitioner of management in numerous context; small business owner, entrepreneur, angel investor, executive in medium-sized businesses, and even as an infantry commander in Vietnam. The negative reviews are well-written and rational. So why the difference in the intensity of difference in reviews?

After some thought and research it dawned on me that the answer may be context, Weick's focus at the time of writing on high reliability organizations (HROs). Weick naturally attempts to push his five principles too far into contexts that are more into business realms that the negative reviewers may be envisioning. A flower shop, a social organization, an industrial firm producing low-value retail product would not fit the HRO mode, nor would their culture demand "mindfulness". Mindfulness might be beneficial to these organization in small portions, but not necessary or sufficient and perhaps counter-productive to success.

Arthur Fiedler, the originator of "contingency theory" (1970s)hypothesized that management style (authoritarian vs. participatory) was dependent upon task context. In a meta-analysis of 24 experimental studies testing contingency theory, Peters (1985) found consistent evidence of the validity of the theory. My personal experience also aligns with Fiedler's theory and I believe that mindfulness may be a dimension of management style.

However, my strongest support for Weick comes from his language of practicality after allowing for his excessive enthusiasm. In his final chapter, Weick offer practical advise to managers, most of which is sound in any context; create awareness.., cultivate humility, speak-up.., etc. It would be hard to argue against an academic espousing such actions.

This book makes you think about "what we don't know"... It rewords and emphasizes a way to plan for future dynamic non-events. That is, those things which we cannot confirm through our conscious experiences.

We have heard, "a stitch in time saves nine", "look before you leap", and "if you fall down; get back up and try it again", well this book restates these sayings and more in a fashion related to the tenents of High Reliability Organizations.

Safety and continuous improvement are not guaranteed; so this book proposes an approach that makes living in a "non-perfect" world possible.

It is an enjoyable read and it is more honest than many other approaches that tend to place blame on the victims and in turn stifle the very solutions that they are attemping to control.

I highly agree with other 1 or 2 stars rated comments. The authors join a strand of literature, ranging from social psychology to behavioral economics and the like (not to mention conceptual schemes oriented schools in philosophy), that highlights human natural "irrationality" and biased reasoning, and the only piece of policy advice they can give is: just be more mindful! If we just see what we expect to see, it is not clear at all how can we possibly be aware of "small" signals that, by authors' definition, just don't fit in our pre-structured conceptual frame, and so are actually non-existent to us. Just like post-modernists threads in analytical philosophy can't explain how, if we are bounded by cultural-group-linguistic conceptual schemes that ante-date us and inform the way we see the world, we can come to criticize such cultural legacy from within, Weick can't explain how actually HROs can come to grips with never-seen/heard of/imagined criticalities (and this can't be explained for the very reason that we accept Weick's socio-psycho-philosophycal underpinnings). It doesn't come as a surprise, so, that successful HROs case studies (such as aircraft carriers) build their smooth functioning on... standard routines and procedures! While those HROs actually survive in an high-volatility environment, they represent a closed system, and so worst case scenarios are just a limited set, hence "preparing for the worst" becomes feasible. I'm sure that even in such highly reliable organizations a highly unthinkable event would hit violently, resilience or not. Just as other strands in Organizational studies, fancied up with concepts from social psychology and bad philosophy such as hermeneutics, this book falls in the same old fallacy of composition propelled by psychologism: organization failure is explained just as the sum of individual perceptual biases. And, quite paradoxically, it winds up entangled too with fallacies propped up by methodological collectivism: organization is seen as a living, organic body, a "mindful" entity capable of hive-mind thinking. Hence individual is treated as virtually non-existent or as beset by perceptual and conceptual biases all along. I might be too fond of old-fashion Rational choice theory as a general paradigm, but if this is the peak of the (no more so) recent psychological revanchism in social sciences I hardly think I'll change my mind about the scope of traditional methodological individualism in the foreseeable future.