Landis Redux...

I forgot to post earlier on a book Denise Landis recommended called Managing the Unexpected: Assuring High Performance in an Age of Complexity. Authors Weick and Sutcliffe have written just over 200 pages on High Reliability Organizations (HROs). What’s an HRO? From one of the editorial reviews on Amazon – “aircraft carriers, nuclear power plants, fire-fighting crews, and others”. The premise seems to be organizations which have to run at a high level of detail to accomplish the missions, but who also have to manage an aspect of “disaster” as a component of business-as-usual.

All Flight Teams have high availability/high performance needs and characteristics – they NEED to be HROs, whether they are or not. I haven’t read the book, but I’ve done some similar work in another industry, so it will be interesting to see how concepts translate. I’ve not read Weick, but Denise recommends it so that’s enough for me – I’ll buy this and check it out…