Customer Reviews

Managing the Unexpected: Resilient Performance in an Age of Uncertainty

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

 

 

This second edition - an update of the 2001 book that introduced us to the 'mindful' organization - is a timely and well-done re-write that furthers the authors' contention that mindfulness is at the core of a learning organization. By substituting a failed preemptive burn incident, (the 2000 Cerro Grande wildland fire that caused $1 billion of damage to Los Alamos), for the 1st edition's Union Pacific/Southern Pacific merger debacle as the central example of their 5 principles of mindfulness, the reader is able to feel the flames of the unexpected leap beyond the control lines of the HRO (High Reliability Organizations) environment. This wind-fed fire metaphor gives life to the uncontrollable nature of today's business environment and every business's need for a mindful response to the unexpected. Managing only for the expected will not provide containment when the winds of change blow into your marketplace. From the authors' perspective, the appropriate response is the creation of an infrastructure to provide the 5 principles of mindfulness.

1. Preoccupation with failure - treating any failure (often small ones) as a symptom that something is wrong with the system, a mindful organization is continually updating its understanding.
2. Reluctance to simplify interpretations - ensuring a more complete and nuanced picture, simplifying less and seeing more.
3. Sensitivity to operations - paying attention to relationships at the front line, where the work gets done.
4. Commitment to resilience - maintaining a deep knowledge of the technology, the system, one's coworkers, and one's self as avenues for improvising and keeping the system functioning.
5. Deference to expertise - cultivating diversity to do more with complexities, mindful organizations push decisions down to the people with the most expertise, not the most rank or even seniority. This deference moves issues around/across the system, migrating problems to someone with the knowledge and capabilities to address them.

I found the book interesting and instructive the first time around, and I was even more impressed with this 2nd edition. Professor's Weick and Sutcliffe make good use of examples to demonstrate their conclusions and to bring the principles to life. The book is thought provoking and instructive; providing yet another perspective on how to manage performance in the face of today's rapidly flattening landscape.

Dennis DeWilde, author of
"The Performance Connection"

Karl E. Weick and Kathleen M. Sutcliffe give readers something new and useful in this book. Countless manuals explain how to plan for crises and make it sound like everything will go smoothly if you just plan correctly. Weick and Sutcliffe know better. Planning, they say, may even stand in the way of smooth processes or be the cause of failure. They base this discussion on their studies of "high reliability organizations" (HROs), like fire fighting units and aircraft carrier crews, organizations where the unexpected is common, small events make a difference, failure is a strong possibility and lives are on the line. From those examples, they deduce principles for planning, preparation and action that will apply to any company facing change. The book is not perfect - the authors overuse quotations and rely on buzzwords that don't add much - but it addresses often-neglected aspects of management. getAbstract recommends it to anyone who is trying to make an organization more reliable and resilient amid change.

I read the 1st edition. I felt after reading it that the authors had the right idea and the first half of the book was very good. The second half, where they describe the audit left me cold.

I'm interested in questions about new product development. Resilience is an important asset in product development work. Everything in the environment around you changes while you work, plus the designers are constantly learning and discovering things as well. As a project manager, you discover your plan is not working the way you expected. How do you deal with this pace of change?

The 2nd edition of the book reaches further past the safety conscious concerns of the first so it is easier for readers to see how the work applies to resilience and product assurance questions in other work.

I was pleased to see the changes and would strongly recommend the 2nd edition over the 1st.

In publication since 2001, this book continues to be used as a training tool for people that respond to disasters such as hurricanes and terriorist attacks as well as wildfire and the principles apply to organizational changes, in particular, responding to situations in a safe manner with a clear idea of what you want to accomplish. Resilient Performance in an Age of Uncertainty says it all.

Other reviewers have aptly summarized the strengths of this really excellent book. Some have referred to the first author's work Social psychology of organizing,( Social Psychology of Organizing (Topics in Social Psychology) but that is to the second edition. The first edition, which appeared in 1969, was, to my mind a truly groundbreaking and mind enhancing work, a total pleasure to read and a pointer to the importance of this new work. The present work, which uses the analysis of high reliability organisations (HROs) to assess the capacities of organizations to deal with change, presents the reader with a structure and a model that is immensely insightful, testable and thus very useful.

I would draw attention of potential readers to two matters that are discussed and will benefit close reading and thought. The issue of the need of organizations to be "sensitive to operations", the need to be at the front line of operations where the action happens, and not back at headquarters observing and surmising from afar, is so important , for all organizations whether they be fire fighting units or schools, nuclear warships or pharmacies. The managers lose sight of daily and minute to minute operations at their peril. Coupled with this is the matter of the need to'defer to expertise". For any organization, the abilities to identify the expert for the problem, not merely a matter of finding the "most experienced", and to ensure that issues are referred to that person at that time in that place, are what optimize the evocation of the responses that enable the survival of the operation.

These issues seem so obvious when set out clearly, as they are in this book, but they cannot be so, given how poorly so many firms and organizations deal with change. The authors also draw out the means whereby the right kind of culture can be developed to ensure that the resilience and responsiveness of the organization can be strengthened and preserved.

I wondered if there was reason why allusion was not made to another popular issue in the social science/management literature, namely the notion of response to "tame versus wicked" problems (cf Grint,Leadership, Management and Command: Rethinking D-Day. That makes for an interesting combination of thoughts and analyses. The interested reader can also benefit from considering the matter of expertise in the resilient organization to the increasing attention being paid to the topic in many venues (e.g. Gladwell, Outliers: The Story of Successwhat defines expertise (cf Collins & Evans, Rethinking Expertise, how it can be recognized, trained and valued, are crucial to how any organization or society handles change and stress.

These latter matters are, however, not criticisms of the book under review. Quite the contrary; they are direct associations created by the challenge of the contents of the book and they add to the total experience.

A book to be savoured, re-read and re-enacted.

Argues from good case studies, and refers back to some of the qualities that made "Social Psychology of Organizing" a truly great book, but it's a bit too cautious and "learned" for my taste. Lots of repetition.

This book was an easy read documenting common sense principles we need to keep in mind (but often forget too) to achieve success. The five principles: Track small failures, Resist oversimplification, Remain sensitive to operations, Maintain capabilities for resilience, and Take advantage of shifting locations of expertise.

It is worth the read.

I think the book is OK except that the same five HRO principles are discussed redundantly throughout. It should have been titled something more like a review of HRO principles. There isnt anything new here, just different labels for the same ideas.

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.