High reliability organization
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
A High Reliability Organization (HRO) is an organization that consistently avoids catastrophes in an environment where normal accidents can be expected due to risk factors or complexity.
Following Stanford sociology professor Charles Perrow’s work, researchers at both the University of Michigan and the University of California, Berkeley, began to look at organizations in high-risk industries that manage complex environments while maintaining high success rates. Success, in this case, is defined as long periods between failure events.
Because these organizations seem to behave in a more reliable way than their counterparts, they were termed "high reliability organizations."
At Berkeley, initial research on HRO behavior was done within the Federal Aviation Administration’s Air Traffic Control Center, a commercial nuclear power plant, and naval aircraft carriers. Researchers 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.
[edit] External links
 |
This organization-related article is a stub. You can help Wikipedia by expanding it. |
 |
This sociology-related article is a stub. You can help Wikipedia by expanding it. |
