NEWICC :: NEWICC HRO

High Reliability Organization (HRO)

The acronym HRO is used in two ways: as a noun that refers to high-reliability organizations and as shorthand for the verb high-reliability organizing. As a noun, HROs are a certain kind of organization. In their book Managing the Unexpected: Assuring High Performance in an Age of Complexity, Karl Weick and Kathleen Sutcliffe write that these HROs “operate under very trying conditions all the time and yet manage to have fewer than their fair share of accidents.” Both research and experience show that these organizations prevent organizational errors from escalating into organizational failure by managing their activities according to five principles, which brings us to high-reliability organizing.

These five principles, when taken together, produce organizational mindfulness. Weick and Sutcliffe identify these hallmarks to mindfulness as preoccupation with failure, reluctance to simplify interpretations, sensitivity to operations, commitment to resilience and deference to expertise. This refers to smart execution and resource mobilization; however, it also refers to a way of thinking and a way of organizing work. High-reliability organizations, and the people who populate them, engage this way of thinking and working all day, every day.

When organizations manage their activities according to these principles, they mix alertness, flexibility and adaptability while anticipating and containing human error. The application to wildland fire is obvious: High-reliability organizations are error-resilient organizations — those that can flex enough and have the organizational capacity to prevent errors from becoming failures, bounce back when errors happen, learn from their mistakes and use that learning to improve.

In fact, continuous learning represents a core competency of high-reliability organizations. Again, the HRO concept presents tremendous potential for fire organizations as they adopt a lessons-learned approach. I assume that most readers will agree with me that high reliability and error resilience are concepts of critical importance to the wildland fire community.

A colleague recently asked me to comment on what threats or challenges to high reliability I thought U.S. wildland fire agencies faced and what those agencies were doing to meet those threats or challenges. To be completely frank, I believe that the greatest challenge to high reliability in the U.S. wildland fire community is that we address the human factor in a less-than-holistic manner. Doctrine, a just culture, understanding human error and its inevitability, leadership, organizational learning, and high-reliability organizing all have enormous potential to solve the many challenges we face.

Unfortunately, these concepts have entered the community piecemeal, in isolation from one another and through different vectors. Every day, I see camps forming around these ideas, and too many fire folks treat them as competing, even mutually exclusive, approaches to our problems. However, these concepts and initiatives remain very compatible and are often mutually supporting.

For example, primarily through the National Wildfire Coordinating Group leadership training curriculum, many members of the wildland fire community have discovered the work of James Reason, his particularly vivid “Swiss cheese” model of error causation and his work on just culture. Experts generally define just culture as an environment of trust in which people are encouraged to provide critical safety-related information, but in which people also are clear about where a bright line exists between acceptable and unacceptable behavior. (See “Can a Just Culture Save Us?” March/April 2007, available at www.wildfiremag.com.) Similarly Weick and Sutcliffe point out that organizations define themselves by how they manage blame and punishment and, in turn, how what they do affects what errors are reported at all.

Reason regards just culture and upward, non-punitive error-reporting as a critical element of an informed safety culture. These features of an informed safety culture distribute situational awareness around the organization and encourage people to speak up without fear of punishment, thereby increasing both information and trust.

According to Weick and Sutcliffe, a mindful culture resembles an informed safety culture. They also point out that people in high-reliability organizations know that the organization needs to have current, valid information, and that this necessity requires people to be able to speak up without fear. With such common ground, Weick and Sutcliffe, Reason, and complex organizations expert Charles Perrow all are aware of each other, draw on each other's research and make clear relationships between their work; it's ironic that we do not. We can't achieve system-wide reliability in the fire community until we break down the walls, unify concepts and take a holistic approach to culture change.

I'll even go out on a limb and suggest that high-reliability organizing may be the concept that can unify the other human factors models gaining traction in the wildland fire community, including doctrine, informed safety culture, human-error understanding, leadership, and organizational learning. Let's get some smart people working on that.

Mike DeGrosky is chief executive officer of the Guidance Group, a consulting organization specializing in the human and organizational aspects of the fire service. He also serves as an adjunct instructor in leadership studies at Fort Hays State University. His interests include leadership, strategy, and bringing the concepts of learning organizations and high-reliability organizing alive in fire organizations. He is currently pursuing a Ph.D. focused on organizational leadership. He can be reached at info@guidancegroup.org.