Organizing for high reliability: Processes of collective mindfulness

High Reliability Organizations (HROs) have been treated as exotic outliers in mainstream organizational theory because of their unique potentials for catastrophic consequences and interactively complex technology. We argue th at HROs are more central to the mainstream because they provide a unique wi ndow into organizational effectiveness under trying conditions. HROs enact a distinctive though not unique set of cognitive processes directed at prox ies for failure, tendencies to simplify, sensitivity to operations, capabil ities for resilience, and temptations to overstructure the system. Taken to gether these processes induce a state of collective mindfulness that create s a rich awareness of discriminatory detail and facilitates the discovery a nd correction of errors capable of escalation into catastrophe. Though dist inctive, these processes are not unique since they are a dormant infrastruc ture for process improvement in all organizations. Analysis of HROs suggest s that inertia is not indigenous to organizing, that routines are effective because of their variation, that learning may be a byproduct of mindfulnes s, and that garbage cans may be safer than hierarchies.