Professor Kathleen Sutcliffe
Professor
John Hopkins University
Organizing for Safety: Ideas from Organization Science
Applying theories from one discipline to another is sometimes fraught because key elements are misunderstood, elided, or simply lost in translation. In this presentation I seek to change that by drawing on safety ideas from organization science, particularly ideas that come out of the high reliability organizing paradigm. The gist of my argument is that safe and reliable performance result from continually managing fluctuations not from organizational invariance.
As environmental volatility, uncertainty, complexity and ambiguity increase so too does organizational vulnerability to surprises and conditions that change without warning. This requires ways of organizing that enable organizational members across an organization to become alert and aware of inevitable fluctuations, to be able to cope with them and to circumscribe or contain them as they occur and before their effects escalate and ramify. It requires collective capabilities to discern details about emerging issues, to quickly make sense of them, and to swiftly deploy the right response to them—to reliably see and handle what is seen; to adapt. Building these systemic collective capabilities is not easy but is critical. I propose a set of building blocks that leaders can use to enable these capabilities.
Kathleen Sutcliffe studies high-hazard organizations and group decision making in order to understand how organizations and their members can perform more safely, reliably, and resiliently in the midst of uncertainty and dynamism. For example, Sutcliffe examines the systemic and organizational origins of medical mistakes and factors that affect the capabilities to rescue patients and untoward situations as bad things are unfolding in these high-risk, dynamic systems. Her aim is to help organizations and their members to apply knowledge from organization theory to improve vital operations and outcomes.
Another area of Sutcliffe’s research focuses on top management teams and group dynamics, including information search processes, sensemaking, communicating, and learning processes, and how these elements affect firm performance. Her work on organizational reliability and collective mindfulness, published in three editions of Managing the Unexpected (co-authored with Karl E. Weick), is internationally renowned. In addition to healthcare, Sutcliffe has studied organizing in wildland firefighting teams, aircraft carriers, oil and gas exploration, and other dynamic high-risk industries.
Before joining Johns Hopkins University in 2014 as a Bloomberg Distinguished Professor of Business and Medicine, Sutcliffe held faculty appointments at the University of Michigan’s Ross School of Business. She currently is a member of the National Academies of Science, Engineering and Medicine Transportation Research Board Committee on Emerging Trends in Aviation Safety, that recently released
its second report titled: Emerging Hazards in Commercial Aviation-Report 2: Ensuring Safety During Transformative Changes.