Managing the Unexpected: Assuring High Performance in an Age of
Complexity
Karl E.
Weick and Kathleen M. Sutcliffe (Jossey Bass, 2002)
Reviewed by A. C. Hyde
In the public sector's rush to become more entrepreneurial aka
risk-taking, some organizations might want to question the leap of faith
required to become an "HC0"or "highly competitive organization." In fact,
there may be a very different path for agencies with missions and competencies
that are more concerned about potential failure than they are pursuing
success. Organizations that come to mind are the military, the wildland
fire-fighting community, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration,
the nuclear power and utility sectors, the Centers for Disease Control,
and public health agencies among others. A new example that all too sensitively
makes the case might be the Transportation Security Administration.
Karl
Weick and Anne Sutcliffe in a new book, Managing The
Unexpected, suggest
that agencies like these are examples of high reliability organizations.
In terms of values, these organizations should share certain characteristics,
which they call mindfulness, to include:
- preoccupation with failure;
- reluctance
to simplify interpretations;
- high sensitivity to operations;
- commitment
to resilience; and
- deference to expertise.
More importantly, Weick and
Sutcliffe argue that organizations that have mindfulness as a hallmark
have much fewer accidents and significant failures, despite operating
in environments with higher degrees of uncertainty. But this book is about
more than a handful of organizations who operate in high-risk environments.
Rather, as the book title suggests, it is all about being prepared
and being concerned about the unexpected or unanticipated. Mindfulness
is more than ...more than being in a state of high alert. being in a constant
state of high awareness—it also includes adaptability, resiliency, and
flexibility under pressure.
Part of the first chapter delves into surprises
and how organizations respond to them. Weick and Sutcliffe even have a
typology of surprises to include:
- "A bolt from the blue."
- "An issue is
recognized, but the direction of the expectation is wrong."
- "You know
what will happen, when it will happen, but your timing is off."
- "Expected
duration of an event proves to be wrong."
- "Problem is expected, but
its amplitude is not."
It seems obvious—indeed there are any number of strategy
tomes and futuring works that dissect what uncertainty is. But few,
as Weick and Sutcliffe do, zero in on something as simple and yet powerful
as what constitutes surprise and why that matters to organization leaders.
A personal favorite quote in the book was the reference to Winston
Churchill who was horrified to learn about the vulnerability of Singapore
to a Japanese land invasion—constructed a four-part self audit
for leaders:
- Why
didn't I know?
- Why didn't my advisers know?
- Why wasn't I told? and
- Why didn't I ask?
This book has some tremendous insights into how leaders
and managers think about events, how they make sense of what they see (or
do not see), and how they reshape their own experience, reinvent context,
and improve their foresight. There are also fascinating illustrations
such as assessments of the work of crews on nuclear aircraft carriers.
In a later chapter, the book also contains nine sets of audit questions
for organizations to gauge their levels of mindfulness. These question
sets will be helpful to managers who want to gauge their managerial mindset
towards mindfulness.
In short, Managing the Unexpected is more than a book
about organizational safety or accident prevention. It continues the
work pioneered by Weick in Sense Making in Organizations and should
capture a much larger audience. In today's post-September 11 environment,
managing the unexpected has taken on new meaning and specisignificance.
Weick and Sutcliffe remind us that for some organizations, this was always
the case, and their values are especially important for public sector managers.
Remember how Robert Frost ends "The Road Not Taken:
" Somewhere ages
and ages hence
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I -
I took the one
less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference.