High Reliability Organizations

High Reliability Organizations (HROs) are the empirical counterweight to Normal Accident Theory. Nuclear submarines operate in sealed environments of extreme complexity and absolute tight coupling; by Perrow's criteria, they should produce normal accidents with catastrophic regularity. They do not. The U.S. Navy's submarine fleet has operated nuclear reactors for over sixty years with a safety record that contradicts what the matrix would predict. Karl Weick and Kathleen Sutcliffe, studying these organizations, identified five capabilities that characterize HROs and explain their anomalous safety performance. The capabilities are not prescriptions for preventing normal accidents — that remains impossible — but prescriptions for surviving them: detecting failures early enough to contain them, maintaining enough redundancy to absorb their impact, possessing enough depth of understanding to diagnose their causes, and learning from each failure in ways that improve response to the next.