Content area
Full Text
Karl E. Weick and Kathleen M. Sutcliffe. Managing the Unexpected: Resilient Performance in an Age of Uncertainty. 2nd Edition San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 2007, 194 pages, $27.95 hardcover.
There's only one certain certainty: death. (Don't plutocrats and corporations avoid taxes?) As for the rest of life, it's a gamble with a gamut of odds, and in workplaces like aircraft carriers where the odds can be very dicey these authors say it's all about managing the unexpected.
The authors, he the distinguished professor at the University of Michigan's business school, and she, the associate dean and a professor there also, set out to think through an explanation of why some organizations, what they call high reliability organizations or HROs, are better at managing the unexpected. My simplistic presumption is that such organizations, if they exist, never take anything for granted, are prepared for any eventuality, and excel at crisis management. That won't do for this cerebral duo of iconic management gurus. They seem loath to simplify.
They induce "from observations of [what they say are] high reliability functioning" (p. 42) five principles as they progress with a phenomenological tour de force through a thick expository in the first four chapters: preoccupation with failure, reluctance to simplify, sensitivity to operations, commitment to resilience, and deference to expertise. The first three they lodge in their construct of anticipation, the last two in their construct of containment. They pack all five into their construct of mindfulness. HROs, they claim, manage mindfully; so let's turn first to this umbrella construct.
Mindfulness is "a rich awareness of discriminatory detail" (p. 32). This is one of many displays of the authors' flair for idiom. Then they immediately explain their explanation: "By that we mean-Mindful people have a big picture of the moment" (p. 32). Having a big picture doesn't connote seeing discriminatory details to me, but it does to the authors. The big picture to them is being aware "of context, of ways in which details differ, and of deviations from their expectations" (p. 32). I always thought having the big picture was like having a Gestalt moment where what is seen is greater than the detailed parts, with perhaps some details being overlooked or unappreciated.
But my exposure to Gestalt psychology was...