1. Don't be tricked by your success. HROs don't gloat over their successes. In fact, it's just the opposite: They are preoccupied with their failures. They are incredibly sensitive to their own lapses and errors, which serve as windows into their system's vulnerability. They pick up on small deviations. And they react early and quickly to anything that doesn't fit with their expectations.
Navy aviators often talk about "leemers," a gut feeling that something isn't right. A pilot feels puzzled, agitated, or anxious. Even though he doesn't know exactly what's wrong, he knows that he needs to abort the mission. Typically, those lemurs turn out to be good intuitions: Something, in fact, is wrong.
HROs create climates where people feel safe trusting their leemers. They question assumptions and report problems. They quickly review unexpected events, no matter how inconsequential. They encourage members to be wary of success, suspicious of quiet periods, and concerned about stability and lack of variety, both of which can lead to carelessness and errors.
2. Defer to your experts on the front line. There are so many deviations out there, so much dissonance. How do we know what's really worth paying attention to? The answer: Listen to your experts -- the people on the front line.
People at the top may think that they have the big picture. More accurately, they have a picture, certainly not the picture, and certainly not bigger in the sense that it includes more data.
The picture that frontline workers see is different. It is drawn from their firsthand knowledge of the company's operations, strengths, and weaknesses. What is important about the frontline workers' view is that these people capture a fuller picture of what the organization faces and what it can actually do. In most cases, they see more chances for bold action than the executives at the top. So it's better for HROs to allow decisions to migrate to frontline expertise rather than to the top of reestablished hierarchies, where positions are often filled for reasons other than experience.
3. Let the unexpected circumstances provide your solution. I've written about the Mann Gulch fire that killed 13 smoke jumpers in 1949. In all, it was a tragic organizational failure. But what was amazing was the reaction of the foreman, Wagner Dodge, when the fire was nearly on top of his men. On the spot, he invented the escape fire -- a small fire that would consume all of the brush around him and his team, leaving an area where the larger fire couldn't burn.
He acted in a way that was contrary to all of the things that firefighters have habitually done. That's part of being resilient. Put simply, it's about having a steady head.
When something out of the ordinary happens, your stress level rises. The safest prediction for what will happen next is that your perception will narrow -- you will get tunnel vision -- and you will miss a lot of stuff. You have to be able to resist that dramatic narrowing of cues -- because within everything that is happening unexpectedly, you will find what you need for a remedy.
4. Embrace complexity. Business is complex, in large part because it is unknowable and unpredictable. In the face of all of this complexity, HROs are reluctant to accept simplification. They understand that it takes complexity to sense complexity.
We all instinctively try to simplify the data that we receive, but there are better and worse simplifications. Better simplifications arise from a deeper knowledge of the environment along with a deeper understanding of the organization and its capabilities. That knowledge and understanding develops when people attend to more things, entertain a greater variety of interpretations, differentiate their ideas, argue, listen to one another, work to reconcile differences, and commit to revisiting and updating whatever profound simplicities they settle on as guidelines for action.
A complex organization is made up of diverse people with diverse experience. Its complexity fosters adaptability.
5. Anticipate -- but also anticipate your limits. We try to anticipate as much as we possibly can. But we can't anticipate everything. There's such a premium on planning, on budgeting, on making the numbers. In the face of all that, the notion of resilience has an affirming quality: You don't have to get it all right in advance.
Good strategy does not rely on anticipation alone. It's built on a smaller scale, updated more frequently, and driven by actions. You don't present it to your board of directors that way, but it's more useful guidance than the kind you can get from a grander notion of strategy. It's not, Think, then act. Instead, it's, Think by acting. By actually doing things, you'll find out what works and what doesn't.
That doesn't mean you should stop anticipating. But you should add in two subtleties. First, focus your attention on key mistakes that you do not want to make. Second, trust your anticipations, but be wary of their accuracy. You can't see the whole context that is developing. Your anticipation is probably a reasonable first approximation of what might be happening, but no matter how shrewd you are, it won't cover some key features.
Most important, you should build a capacity for resilience. Life events are indeterminate. We can't fix or know everything. The beauty and the frightening quality of hubris is that people believe they're in the know completely.
I hope that emergency-room doctors, nuclear-power-plant operators, and firefighters know what the hell they're doing. But I don't believe it for a second. How they struggle with that -- and how you and I struggle with that -- is, for me, the good stuff. That's the human condition.
Keith H. Hammonds (khammonds@fastcompany.com) is a Fast Company senior editor. Contact Karl E. Weick by email (karlw@umich.edu).
Navy aviators often talk about "leemers," a gut feeling that something isn't right. A pilot feels puzzled, agitated, or anxious. Even though he doesn't know exactly what's wrong, he knows that he needs to abort the mission. Typically, those lemurs turn out to be good intuitions: Something, in fact, is wrong.
HROs create climates where people feel safe trusting their leemers. They question assumptions and report problems. They quickly review unexpected events, no matter how inconsequential. They encourage members to be wary of success, suspicious of quiet periods, and concerned about stability and lack of variety, both of which can lead to carelessness and errors.
2. Defer to your experts on the front line. There are so many deviations out there, so much dissonance. How do we know what's really worth paying attention to? The answer: Listen to your experts -- the people on the front line.
People at the top may think that they have the big picture. More accurately, they have a picture, certainly not the picture, and certainly not bigger in the sense that it includes more data.
The picture that frontline workers see is different. It is drawn from their firsthand knowledge of the company's operations, strengths, and weaknesses. What is important about the frontline workers' view is that these people capture a fuller picture of what the organization faces and what it can actually do. In most cases, they see more chances for bold action than the executives at the top. So it's better for HROs to allow decisions to migrate to frontline expertise rather than to the top of reestablished hierarchies, where positions are often filled for reasons other than experience.
3. Let the unexpected circumstances provide your solution. I've written about the Mann Gulch fire that killed 13 smoke jumpers in 1949. In all, it was a tragic organizational failure. But what was amazing was the reaction of the foreman, Wagner Dodge, when the fire was nearly on top of his men. On the spot, he invented the escape fire -- a small fire that would consume all of the brush around him and his team, leaving an area where the larger fire couldn't burn.
He acted in a way that was contrary to all of the things that firefighters have habitually done. That's part of being resilient. Put simply, it's about having a steady head.
When something out of the ordinary happens, your stress level rises. The safest prediction for what will happen next is that your perception will narrow -- you will get tunnel vision -- and you will miss a lot of stuff. You have to be able to resist that dramatic narrowing of cues -- because within everything that is happening unexpectedly, you will find what you need for a remedy.
4. Embrace complexity. Business is complex, in large part because it is unknowable and unpredictable. In the face of all of this complexity, HROs are reluctant to accept simplification. They understand that it takes complexity to sense complexity.
We all instinctively try to simplify the data that we receive, but there are better and worse simplifications. Better simplifications arise from a deeper knowledge of the environment along with a deeper understanding of the organization and its capabilities. That knowledge and understanding develops when people attend to more things, entertain a greater variety of interpretations, differentiate their ideas, argue, listen to one another, work to reconcile differences, and commit to revisiting and updating whatever profound simplicities they settle on as guidelines for action.
A complex organization is made up of diverse people with diverse experience. Its complexity fosters adaptability.
5. Anticipate -- but also anticipate your limits. We try to anticipate as much as we possibly can. But we can't anticipate everything. There's such a premium on planning, on budgeting, on making the numbers. In the face of all that, the notion of resilience has an affirming quality: You don't have to get it all right in advance.
Good strategy does not rely on anticipation alone. It's built on a smaller scale, updated more frequently, and driven by actions. You don't present it to your board of directors that way, but it's more useful guidance than the kind you can get from a grander notion of strategy. It's not, Think, then act. Instead, it's, Think by acting. By actually doing things, you'll find out what works and what doesn't.
That doesn't mean you should stop anticipating. But you should add in two subtleties. First, focus your attention on key mistakes that you do not want to make. Second, trust your anticipations, but be wary of their accuracy. You can't see the whole context that is developing. Your anticipation is probably a reasonable first approximation of what might be happening, but no matter how shrewd you are, it won't cover some key features.
Most important, you should build a capacity for resilience. Life events are indeterminate. We can't fix or know everything. The beauty and the frightening quality of hubris is that people believe they're in the know completely.
I hope that emergency-room doctors, nuclear-power-plant operators, and firefighters know what the hell they're doing. But I don't believe it for a second. How they struggle with that -- and how you and I struggle with that -- is, for me, the good stuff. That's the human condition.
Keith H. Hammonds (khammonds@fastcompany.com) is a Fast Company senior editor. Contact Karl E. Weick by email (karlw@umich.edu).
