Karl E. Weick - Managing the Unexpected: Resilient Performance in an Age of Uncertainty

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Table of Contents

More Praise for the Second Edition ofManaging the Unexpected

If you are concerned about how your organization will respond to an unexpected event that can easily destroy the reputation and financial health of your organization as well as you as a leader, this is the book for you. You will learn from two world-renowned experts what makes organizations susceptible to unexpected catastrophic events and what you can do to make your organization alert and responsive to unexpected and potentially destructive events.

Michael Beer, professor emeritus, Harvard Business School
and chairman, TruePoint Partners

Improving patient safety has, at long last, risen high on the priority listwhere it belongsfor health care leaders. But, as those leaders soon realize, protecting and improving safety and reliability in complex systems is not easy. Simple formulae wont work. Luckily, the technical and social sciences that underlie safe practice have been developing for many decades in sectors other than health care, with the scholarship and teaching of experts like Weick and Sutcliffe. Managing the Unexpected is a tour de force, as it explains and illustrates much of what is now known about organizational and social systems that can achieve high reliability. I know of no better introduction to safety at the state-of-the-art, and it is the first book I now recommend to health care leaders who ask me how they can best deepen their knowledge of this fascinating and crucially important field. Adapting its lessons to the world of patient care is not just possible; if we are to achieve our mission in health care, it is essential.

Donald M. Berwick, MD, MPP, president and CEO,
Institute for Healthcare Improvement

What can a manager in a global firm learn from local forest firefighters in California? Plenty. As businesses fragment their value chains and depend on a wide variety of global suppliers, their systems become fragile. There are more moving parts, few of which they directly own or control. The interlinkages are also continuously changing. In Managing the Unexpected, Weick and Sutcliffe provide an extraordinary blueprint for creating high reliability organizations in which the unexpected is the norm. Capacity to create new knowledge rapidly, substituting collaborative and integrative capacity for investment capacity, and seeing new patterns in weak signals are critical to building a culture that the authors call mindfulness in managing. The insights in this book are a must for those who want to remain at the cutting edge.

C. K. Prahalad, The Paul and Ruth McCracken
Distinguished University Professor of Corporate Strategy,
The Ross School of Business, University of Michigan

For me, Karl Weick and Kathleen Sutcliffe are the giants of the risk and resilience business. Their writings have consistently excited, inspired, and informed me over many years now. They are always beautifully written, always innovative, and marvelously rich in stories and wise paradoxes. They are a joy to read.

I am not surprised that the first edition of Managing the Unexpected has proved to be such a big hit. It reaches out equally to managers and to fellow social scientists. The book translates the five defining characteristics of high reliability organizations (HROs) into a comprehensive program for dealing mindfully with unforeseen, unanticipated, and often unwanted happenings in a variety of risky domains.

The second edition goes still further. Prominent among its new features is a brilliant chapter that describes a change program built around small shifts and alterations that produce visible and tangible results. This small wins strategy is again organized around the five defining principles of HROs: preoccupation with failure, resistance to simplification, sensitivity to the details of operations, commitment to resilience, and deference to expertise. Firefighting, both in its organized form and in its day-to-day reality, is a central theme of this chapter. I found it enriching and full of surprises. This book about dealing with the unexpected is rightly full of unexpected challenges to conventional managerial wisdom. It is perhaps the best thing they have written. I can give it no higher praise. Buy it and live by it.

James Reason, author, Managing the Risks of Organizational Accidents

The quality of responses by organizational leaders at every level to unexpected events and developments either strengthen or weaken the system. The unexpected can, therefore, be a turning point in the fortunes of organizations and their leaders. Do the right thingslike J&Js leaders in the Tylenol crisisand your stock (metaphorically and literally) will rise. Do the wrong thingslike the leaders of FEMA post-Katrinaand you will lose respect and more. But leaders cant wait until the crisis hitsthey have to prepare their organizations and keep them tuned. Weick and Sutcliffe offer valuable insights and practical advice to improve the odds that you will be leading a high reliability organization when the chips are down.

B. Joseph White, president, University of Illinois

Karl E. Weick
Kathleen M. Sutcliffe

Preface

With the unexpected becoming a larger chunk of everyday life, it isnt surprising that we find ourselves interested in resilience and coping. Since the publication of the first edition of Managing the Unexpected, the unexpected has surfaced time and time again. Hurricane Katrina, the Asian tsunami, the Enron scandal, the Columbia space shuttle disaster, terrorist attacks such as 9/11, the London bombings, and the Madrid train disaster, all on a large scale, have tested the stability of our organizations. Most organizations experience unexpected events on a much smaller scale all the time. These dynamic and uncertain times raise the questions of how and why some organizations are much more capable than others of maintaining function and structure in the face of drastic change and of bouncing back in a stronger position to tackle future challenges.

A Book About Reliable Organizations

This book is based on examination of the ways people and organizations organize for high performance in settings where the potential for error and disaster is overwhelming: nuclear aircraft carriers, air traffic control systems, aircraft operations systems, hostage negotiation teams, emergency medical treatment teams, nuclear power generation plants, continuous processing firms, and wildland firefighting crews. These diverse organizations share a singular demand: They have no choice but to function reliably. If reliability is compromised, severe harm results. Adopting the terminology first used by researchers at the University of California, Berkeley, we have lumped these organizations together and called them high reliability organizations (HROs).

Other people who have examined these organizations were struck by their unique structural features. We saw something else. These organizations also think and act differently. Their processes and practices are different, but not in ways that are uniquely different.

Like most other business organizations, HROs experience unexpected problems continually, and most of those problems involve a lapse in reliability. Either somebody counts on something to happen and it doesnt, or someone counts on something not to happen and it does. And most of these lapses do not emerge abruptly as full-blown issues. Instead, small clues accumulate for some time and suggest that unexpected things are happening and arent going away.

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