Highly Reliable Organization (HRO) Approach to Creating a High Performance Organization

Dr. Karl Weick from the University of Michigan and Dr. David Roberto from Harvard Business School (among others) have analyzed organizations that are both fragile process organizations and must perform certain functions extremely well. Examples are emergency rooms, nuclear power plants, aircraft carriers, and IT infrastructure organizations, to name just a few. These kinds of organizations have come to be known as Highly Reliable Organizations, or “HROs.”

Our practice has taken the best of HRO theory, and in a highly customized way, grafted the useful parts onto the cultural DNA of organizations to help them better deal with performance, risk, scale, and complexity. We believe this is one of the best ways to help create truly “High Performance Organizations.”

When might a tailored HRO approach help the effectiveness of your organization? See below if your organization bears some of the characteristics of a “Fragile Process Organization,” and if some of the behaviors within HROs resonate with you as potentially being helpful to your organization’s effectiveness.

What are “Fragile Process Organizations?”

Fragile Process Organizations typically:

	Involve complex interactions as an integral part of operations
	Have many “moving parts” in terms of process
	Tend to have complex procedures and process rules
	Have “tight coupling” among processes (i.e., very little “slack”)
	Are time dependent
	Require a rigid sequence of processes for successful output
	Can face situations where an accumulation of small events may cause an eventual disaster

What Are the Behaviors of HROs?

HROs typically exhibit a host of behaviors that make them successful, but those behaviors can usually be lumped into five groups of “meta behaviors” as follows:

	Preoccupied with failure
	Reluctant to simplify interpretations
	Sensitive to operations
	Committed to resilience
	Defer to expertise (as opposed to authority)

(These behaviors and the phrase “Highly Reliable Organizations” are adapted from Weick, Karl and Sutcliffe, Kathleen. “Managing the Unexpected,” 2001)

Examples of Our Work in This Area:

	For an IT infrastructure unit of large pharmaceutical company, we arranged a visit to a world-class emergency room, and through discussions both before and after that visit, helped the client’s senior management look at creating top-tier organizational performance in a positive, proactive way
	For a large process-based manufacturing complex, we helped utilize HRO theory to assist the organization in dealing with explosive growth in scale, complexity, and risk to the parent organization
	For a large pharmaceutical company, assistance in applying HRO theory, particularly weak signals theory, to the early identification of potential issues which could interrupt production and/or create quality and compliance problems