High Reliability Organization - Characteristics

Characteristics

Researchers have found that successful organizations in high-risk industries continually reinvent themselves. For example, when an incident command team realizes what they thought was a garage fire has now changed into a hazardous material incident, they completely restructure their response organization. HRO teams are comfortable and adept at quickly building creative responses to failure. Failure happens, and HRO teams lean on their training, experience, and imagination as a reliable means to recover from failure.

There are five characteristics of High Reliability Organizations that have been identified as responsible for the "mindfulness" that keeps them working well when facing unexpected situations.

• Preoccupation with failure
• Reluctance to simplify interpretations
• Sensitivity to operations
• Commitment to resilience
• Deference to expertise

Practitioners in High Reliability Organizing (HRO) work in recognized high risk occupations and environments. Wildfires create complex and very dynamic mega-crisis situations across the globe every year. U.S. wildland firefighters, often organized using the Incident Command System into flexible interagency incident management teams, are not only called upon to "bring order to chaos" in today's huge mega-fires, they also are requested on "all-hazard events" like hurricanes, floods and earthquakes. The U.S. Wildland Fire Lessons Learned Center has been providing education and training to the wildland fire community on High Reliability Organizing since 2002. HRO behaviors can be recognized and further developed into high-functioning skills of anticipation and resilience. Learning organizations that strive for high performance in things they can plan for, can become highly reliable organizations that are able to better manage unexpected events that by definition cannot be planned for.