High Reliability Organizing in High Risk Industries Banner - Artwork by E. Steele, for the Wildland Fire Lessons Learned Center

Menu:

Updates:

Jan 22, 2009:
Created new goal page

Our GoalBrain Structure and Reliability


In operational terms:
How does a person ensure reliability through action? 
Which values bring reliability? 
Can we identify reliability beliefs?

 

From the Great Depression, 1950-60’s public safety, and combat from WWII to Viet Nam Our approach comes from the experience of individuals who engaged, if not embraced, crises as the only means to bring resolution.  These individuals would join with each other, trusting only those who stood at their side, in a belief that teams form around an objective and that members of the team would support each other.  You learn what works through action.

The Intersection of Technology, Human Performance, and Social Interactions
As interactions with technology, human performance, and social interactions became moreThe original Prime Crew of Apollo 13: (l-r) CDR Jim Lovell, CMP Ken Mattingly, & LMP Fred Haise. - not the movie complex people began to look outside themselves for resolution of crises.  People find particularly attractive authorities and rules or standards as their saviors during uncertainty.  With time, the knowledge gained from experience is becoming lost, replaced with rules, policies, and protocols.

Some practitioners have started to reverse this loss of knowledge, aided by such academicians as Karlene Roberts and Karl Weick who have codified these traits of highly reliable and high performing organizations.  This codification facilitates communication of primary experience to others outside of a specialty.  Paramedics, aviators, respiratory care practitioners, physicians, firefighters, combat veterans, and dietitians can now share their primary experience using common terms.  This information flow will help us capture the disappearing knowledge of how to approach danger; it will bring science to the art of crises engagement.

A shared language for primary experience
Chemists, physicists, and biologists can meet and discuss questions with a common language.  Psychologists and sociologists also have a common language.  In terms of research, the social, physical, and biological sciences can all sit at the same table and discuss science.  We intend for the same with practitioners who work under threat, face uncertainty, and function with time limitations.  We would like to see, seated at the same table using a common language, the kindergarten teacher, combat veteran, wildland firefighter, oil refinery worker, nuclear materials worker, and nursing home administrator discuss their experience in a manner that allows sharing of quandaries and solutions.

Recapture this knowledge before it is lost
The San Bernardino Group will capture the knowledge of this fading legacy.  Through this knowledge capture we will participate in knowledge transfer to those who seek a better means of work besides rules and authority for those events that occur between the rules.

In the final analysis, "HRO is just problem solving," (Racquel Calderon, BS, RRCP)

High-Reliability.Org as a Resource
High Reliability Organizing comes from the individual.  We learned it from individuals, sometimes in formal programs but most often in small groups or one-on-one.  We sometimes learned it in preparation for our work, sometimes afterward in lessons learned, but most often in real time as we dealt with uncertainty and had to come to a solution. This website will serve as a resource with the raw individual stories that retain their immediacy.  From such stories we hope to present the mosaic of high reliability.