Managing the Unexpected E-Book

Karl E. Weick

• Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
• Kategorie: Fachliteratur
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2015

Seitenzahl: 300

Beschreibung

Improve your company's ability to avoid or manage crises Managing the Unexpected, Third Edition is a thoroughly revised text that offers an updated look at the groundbreaking ideas explored in the first and second editions. Revised to reflect events emblematic of the unique challenges that organizations have faced in recent years, including bank failures, intelligence failures, quality failures, and other organizational misfortunes, often sparked by organizational actions, this critical book focuses on why some organizations are better able to sustain high performance in the face of unanticipated change. High reliability organizations (HROs), including commercial aviation, emergency rooms, aircraft carrier flight operations, and firefighting units, are looked to as models of exceptional organizational preparedness. This essential text explains the development of unexpected events and guides you in improving your organization for more reliable performance. "Expect the unexpected" is a popular mantra for a reason: it's rooted in experience. Since the dawn of civilization, organizations have been rocked by natural disasters, civil unrest, international conflict, and other unexpected crises that impact their ability to function. Understanding how to maintain function when catastrophe strikes is key to keeping your organization afloat. * Explore the many different kinds of unexpected events that your organization may face * Consider updated case studies and research * Discuss how highly reliable organizations are able to maintain control during unexpected events * Discover tactics that may bolster your organization's ability to face the unexpected with confidence Managing the Unexpected, Third Edition offers updated, valuable content to professionals who want to strengthen the preparedness of their organizations--and confidently face unexpected challenges.

Leseprobe

CONTENTS

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Preface

Acknowledgments

Chapter 1: Mismanaging the Unexpected

Washington Mutual Mismanages the Unexpected

Conclusion

Overview of Subsequent Chapters

Chapter 2: The Infrastructure of Mindful Organizing

Overview of the Collapse and Recovery

The Unexpected and the Expected

Sensemaking

Organizing and Collective Sensemaking

Adaptive Managing

A Concluding Assessment

Chapter 3: Principle 1: Preoccupation with Failure

Components of Preoccupation with Failure

Connotations of Preoccupation with Failure

The Mind-Set for Preoccupation with Failure

Practicing a Preoccupation with Failure

Chapter 4: Principle 2: Reluctance to Simplify

Organizing More Variety into Processes

Organizing for Sense-Discrediting

Organizing for Action-Based Inquiry

Mind-Set for Reluctance

Practicing a Reluctance to Simplify

Chapter 5: Principle 3: Sensitivity to Operations

Operations as an Anchoring in the Present

Operations as an Integrated Map

Operations as Heedful Interrelating

Operations as Events under Pressure

Operations as Recurring Events

The Mind-Set for Sensitivity to Operations

Practicing a Sensitivity to Operations

Chapter 6: Principle 4: Commitment to Resilience

Anticipation and Resilience

Elasticity and Recovery

Resilience in the Air Traffic System: United Airlines 232

What Do We Learn about Resilience from UA 232?

Mind-Set for Commitment to Resilience

Practicing a Commitment to Resilience

Chapter 7: Principle 5: Deference to Expertise

Background

Properties of Deference to Expertise

Refinements

Expertise Resembles the Role of Reliability Professionals

Mind-Set for Deference to Expertise

Practicing Deference to Expertise

Chapter 8: Organizational Culture and Reliability

What Is Organizational Culture?

How Culture Develops

The Case of Toyota

Reorganizing at Toyota

Chapter Summary

Chapter 9: Sustaining Sustained Performance

Sustained Awareness

Sustained Surfacing

Sustained Organizing

Sustained Updating

Sustained Agency

Sustained Variety

Sustained Change

Conclusion

About the Authors

Karl E. Weick

Kathleen M. Sutcliffe

Index

End User License Agreement

List of Illustrations

Figure 2.1

Figure 2.2

Figure 2.3

Figure 2.4

Figure 2.5

Guide

Cover

Table of Contents

Begin Reading

Chapter 1

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Managing the Unexpected

Sustained Performance in a Complex World

Third Edition

Karl E. Weick

Kathleen M. Sutcliffe

Cover image: © iStock.com / ImageGap

Cover design: Wiley

Copyright © 2015 by Karl E. Weick and Kathleen M. Sutcliffe. All rights reserved.

Published by John Wiley & Sons, Inc., Hoboken, New Jersey.

Published simultaneously in Canada.

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Preface

Unexpected events can be disorganizing. It takes both anticipation and resilience to manage unexpected disruptions, a combination that we call mindful organizing. This pattern was implicit in the original studies of high reliability organizations (HROs) and became more explicit as a more varied set of organizations were examined. These increases in variety, however, did not always deepen our understanding of the basic processes involved. That judgment is less a criticism than it is the identification of a niche.

In the two previous editions of this book, we also have discussed processes of high reliability that could be adopted more widely. In this third edition we are more concerned with foundations. We still add to variety by exploring elements of high reliability organizing in settings such as banking, museum curating, latent fingerprint identification, aircraft piloting, and automobile manufacturing. But we spend more time discussing the complexity of each of the five principles that are built on failure, simplification, operations, resilience, and expertise. Our intent is to show that considerable collective commitment and competence are necessary, both to deploy these five in the face of the unexpected and to organize around them in order to sustain performance. Managing the unexpected is not simply an exercise in going down a checklist. Indeed, one of the ironies of probing deeper into the complexities of high reliability organizing is that the principles gain new relevance for everyday life lived in places that are not large, high-hazard, technical systems. We argue that microlevel and mesolevel patterns impose constraints on more macro systems. Thus, one way to approach this book is to treat it as an analysis of the experience of reliability. Crucial moments in that experience occur when people size up and act on the unexpected before it escalates out of control. Those moments are crucial because nonobvious disruptions can be handled in two different ways. They can be normalized away as familiar or made to stand out when they are anomalized as unfamiliar. Resolving the disruption one way or the other depends on how people organize their activities. This line of argument introduces a sense of agency rather than fatalism into settings that often appear monolithic, closed, and rigid. Our inspiration clearly remains HROs. Our aim is to dig deeper into the human side of what works for them.

This third edition differs from previous editions in several ways. We pay more attention to sensemaking, interacting, and language, mindful of wildland firefighter David Allen's comment, “You presume that people in HROs are already communicating.” He's right. We did presume that and now try to give that presumption more substance. We analyze a broader range of cases in an effort to show the generalizability of mindful organizing directed at sustained reliable performance. We devote a full chapter to each of the five principles to illustrate the context that supports them, complications that they entail, and ways they can be woven into current functioning in most organizations. The relationship of our argument to topics such as organizational safety and risk management is one of a shared concern with order and recurring action patterns. In our case, we try to describe the performative character of order creation and maintenance and the agency that this implies. Organizing holds events together and reliable performance depends on sustained organizing. But the organizing that we discuss should not be confused with organizational design. In many ways, organizing as we discuss it amounts to workarounds necessitated by flawed formal designs. Our frequent use of quotations from other sources is intentional. This style clarifies the lineage of ideas, anchors interpretations, and provides raw materials so that readers can make their own interpretations and customization.

Newer analyses of the original three HROs—an aircraft carrier, an air traffic control facility, and an electrical power generation unit—clarify that all three were “best of their class.”1 Our orientation is both to dig deeper into why they were best and, more important, to describe how groups not included in this class can get better.

Note

1.

Todd R. LaPorte, “On Vectors and Retrospection: Reflections on Understanding Public Organizations,”

Journal of Contingencies and Crisis Management

19, no. 1 (2011): 62.

Acknowledgments

Since publishing the second edition, we have continued to examine themes of reliability in organizing and have been greatly helped by people whose efforts we deeply appreciate. This revised third edition was strengthened by ongoing discussions with Daved van Stralen, Gary Provansal, Dan Kleinman, Michele Barton, Marlys Christianson, Kyle Weick, Tim Vogus, Dan Gruber, Paul Schulman, Tom Mercer, Maria Farkas, Erik Helzer, Sharon Kim, Peter Pronovost, Bob Wears, Dave Thomas, Bert Slagmolen, Annette Gerbauer, Randy Cadieux, Ralph Soule, Marc Flitter, Dionysiou Dionysis, and Barbara Czarniawska.

Our families have been lovingly patient with our efforts, and none of this would have been possible without them being there for us. Karen Weick and Tim Wintermute have held things together for all of us. To dedicate this book to them is an unduly small gesture, considering how much they mean to us.

Chapter 1Mismanaging the Unexpected

“A breakdown is not a negative situation to be avoided, but a situation of nonobviousness.”1

—Terry Winograd and Fernando Flores

“Danger, disquiet, anxiety attend the unknown—the first instinct is to eliminate those distressing states. First principle: any explanation is better than none.…The first idea which explains that the unknown is in fact the known does so much good that one ‘holds it for true.’”2

—Friedrich Nietzsche

Nonobvious breakdowns happen all the time. Some are a big deal. Most are not. But which are which? The answer to that question is hazy because we tend to settle for the “first explanation” that makes us feel in control. That explanation turns the unknown into the known, which makes the explanation appear to be “true.” That can be a serious misjudgment. This book is about what we could call “the second explanation,” the one that—discomforting though it may be—treats the unknown This second explanation is built from processes that produce an ongoing focus on failures, simplifications, operations, options, and expertise. Organizing that incorporates processes with these five areas of focus helps make breakdowns more knowable. These processes are an effortful means to maintain reliable performance, but previous work on high reliability organizations (HROs) shows that effortful processes like these make breakdowns more obvious at earlier stages in their development.