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Zum Verständnis organisationaler Zuverlässigkeit von Einsatzorganisationen
Abstract
Im vorliegenden Beitrag erläutert die Autorin zunächst die in der gegenwärtigen Hochzuverlässigkeitsforschung thematisierten theoretischen Konstrukte Improvisation, Mindfulness, Organisationale Routinen, Resilienz sowie Sensemaking. Darüber hinaus wird ein Bezugsrahmen konzipiert, der die Zusammenhänge zwischen den beschriebenen Konstrukten zum Verständnis organisationaler Zuverlässigkeit von Einsatzorganisationen aus einer holistischen Perspektive adressiert. Die Autorin resümiert, dass die beschriebenen Konstrukte als Komponenten einsatzspezifischen Organisierens im Spannungsfeld zwischen Standardisierung und Flexibilität zu begreifen sind. In diesem Zusammenhang wird überdies die besondere Rolle von Kommunikation als übergeordnetes, strukturierendes Element von Erfahrungen bzw. Wahrnehmungen in Hochrisikosituationen hervorgehoben.
Der aktuelle Versorgungs-Report geht der Frage nach, welche Auswirkungen der Klimawandel auf unsere Gesundheit hat und welche Konsequenzen sich daraus für die medizinische Versorgung in Deutschland ergeben. Dabei bringt er die unterschiedlichen Perspektiven von Umweltepidemiologie, Medizin und Gesundheitspolitik zusammen. Expertinnen und Experten analysieren in insgesamt 16 Fachbeiträgen den Einfluss des Klimawandels auf Erkrankungshäufigkeiten, gefährdete Bevölkerungsgruppen und Infrastrukturen der Gesundheitsversorgung. Der Report verfolgt das Ziel, aktuelle wissenschaftliche Erkenntnisse für die Versorgungspraxis aufzubereiten und so zu einer stärkeren Sensibilisierung für die gesundheitlichen Folgen des Klimawandels in der Gesellschaft beizutragen. Dargelegt werden: - klimawissenschaftliche Grundlagen und Gesundheitsfolgen der Klimaveränderungen - versorgungsbezogene Analysen zu bedeutsamen Gesundheitsrisiken und Präventionsempfehlungen - Verhalten der Bevölkerung auf Basis einer aktuellen deutschlandweiten Befragung - Anpassungsbedarf auf infrastrukturell-organisatorischer Ebene Der Teil „Daten und Analysen“ informiert umfassend über die Häufigkeit von Erkrankungen und Behandlungen in Deutschland.
Im vorliegenden Beitrag führt die Autorin zunächst grundlegende Betrachtungen zur Definition und Einordnung des Begriffes Einsatzorganisation durch. Darauf aufbauend entwickelt sie einen Bezugsrahmen zur Charakterisierung von Einsatzorganisationen und diskutiert deren wesentliche Spezifika. Die daraus gewonnenen Erkenntnisse führen zu einem besseren Verständnis der Funktionsweise dieser besonderen Organisationen und liefern interessante Impulse für Wissenschaft und Praxis.
In diesem Beitrag diskutiert die Autorin, inwiefern Einsatzorganisationen hinsichtlich bislang unberücksichtigter Bedürfnisse in ihrer Arbeit durch einen adäquaten Einsatz moderner Managementinstrumente unterstützt werden können. Diesbezüglich werden insbesondere die Konzepte der Organisationalen Resilienz sowie der Antifragilität adressiert. Abschließend untersucht die Autorin, inwieweit die genannten Argumentationsstränge miteinander harmonieren können.
Der vorliegende Beitrag geht der Frage nach, welche Bedeutung Lernprozesse in Einsatzorganisationen haben. Hierzu werden Spezifika dieses Organisationstyps herausgearbeitet und der Zusammenhang zwischen Einsatz und Lernen verdeutlicht. Es wird eine Differenzierung zwischen Einsatz, Extremsituation und Katastrophe vorgenommen, um unterschiedliche Lernanforderungen in Einsatzsituationen darzustellen. Der Autor argumentiert, dass Einsätze – als wesentliches Merkmal von Einsatzorganisationen – Arbeitssituationen darstellen, die durch Flexibilität und Lernförderlichkeit gekennzeichnet sind. Zudem wird der Prozess der Ungewissheitsbewältigung in Einsatzsituationen aus sozialpsychologischer Sicht erläutert.
Die Ausführungen der vorangegangenen Kapitel haben gezeigt, dass Einsatzorganisationen einen eigenständigen Organisationstypus darstellen, der sich vor allem aufgrund prägender Anforderungen an deren Leistungserstellung ausgebildet hat. Dies konnte durch die in diesem Sammelband publizierten Beiträge – sowohl aus wissenschaftlicher als auch aus praxisorientierter Perspektive – anhand zahlreicher Beispiele illustriert werden. Es wurden unterschiedlichste thematische Bereiche im einsatzorganisationsspezifischen Kontext adressiert: Organisationale Zuverlässigkeit bzw. Resilienz und Antifragilität, Führung in Extremsituationen, Wissen, Lernen und Ausbildung, Beschaffungs- und Risikomanagement oder Stabsarbeit, Aufbau- und Führungsorganisation sowie diverse Formen der Zusammenarbeit von Einsatzorganisationen.
In diesem Beitrag diskutiert die Autorin, inwiefern Einsatzorganisationen hinsichtlich bislang unberücksichtigter Bedürfnisse in ihrer Arbeit durch einen adäquaten Einsatz moderner Managementinstrumente unterstützt werden können. Diesbezüglich werden insbesondere die Konzepte der Organisationalen Resilienz sowie der Antifragilität adressiert. Abschließend untersucht die Autorin, inwieweit die genannten Argumentationsstränge miteinander harmonieren können.
Purpose
The purpose of this paper is to expand understandings of interorganizational collaboration among high reliability organizations (HROs). It proposes that HROs face unique needs for relationship building, pre-planning, and retrospective sensemaking that do not fit within prior models of collaboration. For HROs, definitions of collaboration vary contextually based on needs that arise during emergency situations. HROs have a need for both hierarchical structure and collaborative processes and use collaboration as a sensemaking frame that allows practitioners to attend to both needs.
Design/methodology/approach
The paper uses a case study from an ongoing ethnographic study of an emergency response collaboration. The paper uses open-ended interviews about collaboration with all key members of the incident response hierarchy, and participant observation of collaboration before, during and after a key emergency incident.
Findings
The paper proposes a new framework for HRO collaboration: that collaboration is a sensemaking frame for HROs used to make sense of individual actions, that HRO collaboration is more complex during pre-planning and focused on individual decision making during incidents, and that members can communicatively make sense of the need for hierarchy and collaborative action by defining these needs contextually.
Research limitations/implications
The paper uses an in-depth case study of an incident to explore this collaborative framework; therefore, researchers are encouraged to test this framework in additional high reliability collaborative contexts.
Practical implications
The paper includes implications for best communicative practices to recognize the need to be both hierarchical and flexible in high reliability organizing.
Originality/value
This paper fulfills a need to expand collaboration literature beyond idealized and egalitarian definitions, in order to understand how practitioners use communication to understand their actions as collaborative, especially in organizations that also require hierarchy and individual actions. This case study suggests that collaboration as a sensemaking frame creates collaborative advantages for HROs, but can also limit sensemaking about incident management.
Purpose
The purpose of this paper is to explain how adaptive capacity is accomplished through communication processes and can contribute to enhancing disaster resilience. The authors adopt a structurational “four flows” explanation of communication processes.
Design/methodology/approach
The authors observed and analyzed discourse in meetings of a crisis communication network consisting of representatives of municipalities and public authorities involved in crisis communication management during the Västmanland wildfire in Sweden.
Findings
Adaptive capacity during the wildfire was principally accomplished through the structurational communication processes or “flows” of self-structuring, activity coordination, and institutional positioning. These flows intersected demonstrating how communication accomplishes the development of a responsive affiliation, organizes stabilizing structuring practices, and enables adaptive structuring practices.
Research limitations/implications
The main contribution of this study is a communicative explanation for adaptive capacity, which draws from a structurational model of constitutive communication, and lends further understanding to improvisation during disasters.
Practical implications
The authors discuss the findings in relation to improvisation, suggesting how the findings can inform future coordinated crisis communication for the public and news media. The recommendations address how practitioners might build a responsive affiliation, use minimal structures (e.g. communication practices), and maintain flexibility by introducing group reflexivity behaviors.
Originality/value
The authors provide new theoretical and empirical knowledge of the communicative constitution of adaptive capacity during a disaster.
Fast-response organizations are under increased scrutiny as to their ability to mount a timely and coordinated response to unexpected events. Our inductive study focuses on a high profile murder that occurred in Amsterdam in 2011 where a large multidisciplinary police team faced major coordination challenges and was unsuccessful in switching from the practice of surveillance to that of apprehension when their target was suddenly gunned down. Our analysis suggests that challenges related to relational ambiguity, knowledge flows, communications technology, team composition, and field obstructions, hindered the switching between practices under conditions of surprise and fast response. The paper offers a theoretical framework toward a greater understanding of the persistent coordination challenges that arise when a sudden switch from one practice to another becomes necessary. Our study contributes toward a greater understanding of practice performance and the social and material challenges related to switching between practices.
In recent years, research on mindfulness has grown rapidly in organizational psychology and organizational behavior. Specifically, two bodies of research have emerged: One focuses on the intrapsychic processes of individual mind-fulness and the other on the social processes of collective mindfulness. In this review we provide a pioneering, cross-level review of mindfulness in organizations and find that mindfulness is neither mysterious nor mystical, but rather can be reliably and validly measured, linked to an array of individual and organizational outcomes, and induced through meditative and nonmeditative practices and processes at the individual and collective levels. Our analysis of the combined literatures further reveals that although each literature is impressive, there is a significant need for multilevel mindfulness research that simultaneously examines individual and collective mindfulness and broadens its conception of context. This research agenda provides a more robust understanding of the antecedents, processes, and consequences of individual and collective mindfulness as well as more definitive evidence maximizing mindfulness and its benefits in practice.
Organizations increasingly face surprises with regularity, yet little is known about how they develop the responses to unexpected events that enable their work to continue. We compare ethnographic data from two types of organizations that regularly deal with surprises, a police SWAT team and film production crews. We find that individuals engage in organizational bricolage, restructuring their activities by role shifting, reorganizing routines, and reassembling the work. Organizational bricolage depends on the sociocognitive resources that group members develop by drafting agreement on the work, reinforcing and elaborating task activities, and building cross-member expertise.
Organization studies have long focused on the problem of understanding the possibility of
pursuing effectiveness and resilience at the same time. An emerging perspective, reconciling mindfulness and routines, allows to address these contrasting goals: routines channel the exploratory nature of mindfulness, but they also support it by providing context to its enactment. Despite these results, available empirical evidence from mindful organizations has not helped understand how mindfulness can be supported by routines without losing its broader scope of attention. Moreover, an operational definition of mindfulness is still an open question. In this paper, we adopt an analytical framework allowing to break down routines into their sensing and reacting components. Using evidence from the flying practices of Tornado crews in the
Italian Air Force, we show that mindfulness concerns the parallel activation and re-combination of these components, allowing the rapid deployment of responses but also the continuous reassessment of the situation.
This research note documents the initial findings of an ongoing ethnographic study at a fire and emergency service. This particular organization has become a focus of attention because of its skilled coordination of handling large-scale organized events in cooperation with a large number of other organizations, thereby increasing their reliability. First of all, we will introduce the case and our observations, then discuss our findings against the backdrop of high-reliability theory. We use these findings to characterize high-reliability networks.
The purpose of this essay is to improve the way we talk about organizational improvisation, using the vehicle of jazz improvisation as the source of orienting ideas. I start with two brief descriptions of the complexity involved when musicians compose in the moment. Then I review several definitions intended to capture holistically what is happening when people improvise. Next, I take a closer look at selected details in improvisation, namely, degrees of improvisation, forms for improvisation, and cognition in improvisation. These understandings are then generalized from jazz to other settings such as conversation, therapy, and relationships of command. I conclude with implications for theory and practice.
Drawing on Symbolic Interactionism, we propose a process model for the creation and recreation
of routines. Our model extends the performative perspective by exploring how routines, as
collective accomplishments, are (re)created from within. In particular, we examine the mutual
constitution of routines’ constituent parts (performative and ostensive) through interaction, and
develop endogenous explanations of routine (re)creation grounded on the actions and
understandings of mutually susceptible participants. Mead’s concept of role taking, with its
strong emphasis on the relational aspect of agency, enables us to account for the fitting together
of individual lines of action (performative) and the sharing of participants’ schemata (included in
the ostensive) as mutually constituted processes that occur as participants develop distinct selves
in the context of a routine. Moreover, we account for the content and structure of the ostensive
aspect and propose a conceptualization that does justice to it as a singular structural construct
and allows for its multiplicity.
This article aims to challenge some of the assumptions which we make in our understanding of leadership, through empirical illustration from a large organization where a chief executive endeavours to ‘lead’ global change. The continuing search for the Holy Grail, which seems to characterize interest in leadership, implies that research efforts are perhaps being directed at ‘solving the wrong problem’. Leadership as a form of social influence is hard to distinguish from many other influences in relationships between people yet, it is argued, its emphasis on moving towards future action encourages a conception not dissimilar to organizing. The case analysis developed in this article goes on to reframe leadership as an example of sensemaking. It concludes that while sensemaking will never replace leadership as a focus or topic of interest, to understand leadership as a sensemaking process helps illustrate more clearly what happens in the daily doing of leading.
This paper demonstrates how the art form jazz improvisation can be applied to organizational innovative activities, focusing specifically on product innovation. In the past, the literature on product innovation focused on well-planned approaches which followed a clearly-understood structure based on a rational-functionalist paradigm. However, it is becoming increasingly evident that this model is inappropriate in today's highly competitive business environment. A balance between structure and flexibility seems to be an appropriate way to manage the contradicting demands of control and creativity faced by organizations in highly competitive environments. Jazz improvisation provides this synthesis through the concept of 'minimal structures'. We characterize the minimal structures that allow jazz improvisers to merge composition and performance, and then proceed to apply this approach to new product development.
A longitudinal study of the social processes of organizational sensemaking suggests that they unfold in four distinct forms: guided, fragmented, restricted, and minimal. These forms result from the degree to which leaders and stakeholders engage in "sensegiving"—attempts to influence others' understandings of an issue. Each of the four forms of organizational sensemaking is associated with a distinct set of process characteristics that capture the dominant pattern of interaction. They also each result in particular outcomes, specifically, the nature of the accounts and actions generated.
Leaders in high-reliability organizational contexts such as firefighting, emergency medicine, and law enforcement often face the challenge of making sense of environments that are dangerous, highly ambiguous, and rapidly changing. Most leadership research, however, has focused on more stable conditions. This study analyzed 100 reports of “near-miss” situations in which firefighters narrowly escaped injury or death, drawing upon sensemaking and high-reliability organizational theories to provide a grounded theory of leadership processes within extreme events. Themes related to direction setting, knowledge, talk, role acting, role modeling, trust, situational awareness, and agility were key categories. Further abstraction of the data revealed the higher-order categories of framing, heedful interrelating, and adjusting as key characteristics of the overall social process of leadership within dangerous contexts, labeled organizing ambiguity. These findings highlight leadership as a collective sensemaking process in which ambiguity is reduced and resilience promoted in the face of danger via interaction among and between leaders and followers.
A field study of 29 resource-constrained firmsthat varied dramatically in their responses to similar objective environmentsis used to examine the process by which entrepreneurs in resource-poorenvironments were able to render unique services by recombining elements athand for new purposes that challenged institutional definitions and limits.We found that Lévi-Strauss’s concept of bricolage—making do with what isat hand—explained many of the behaviors we observed in small firms that wereable to create something from nothing by exploiting physical, social, orinstitutional inputs that other firms rejected or ignored. We demonstrate the socially constructed nature of resource environments andthe role of bricolage in this construction. Using our field data and theexisting literature on bricolage, we advance a formal definition ofentrepreneurial bricolage and induce the beginnings of a process model ofbricolage and firm growth. Central to our contribution is the notion thatcompanies engaging in bricolage refuse to enact the limitations imposed bydominant definitions of resource environments, suggesting that, forunderstanding entrepreneurial behavior, a constructivist approach to resourceenvironments is more fruitful than objectivist views. (Publisher’sAbstract)
Considers structural inertia in organizational populations as an outcome of an ecological-evolutionary process. Structural inertia is considered to be a consequence of selection as opposed to a precondition. The focus of this analysis is on the timing of organizational change. Structural inertia is defined to be a correspondence between a class of organizations and their environments. Reliably producing collective action and accounting rationally for their activities are identified as important organizational competencies. This reliability and accountability are achieved when the organization has the capacity to reproduce structure with high fidelity. Organizations are composed of various hierarchical layers that vary in their ability to respond and change. Organizational goals, forms of authority, core technology, and marketing strategy are the four organizational properties used to classify organizations in the proposed theory. Older organizations are found to have more inertia than younger ones. The effect of size on inertia is more difficult to determine. The variance in inertia with respect to the complexity of organizational arrangements is also explored. (SRD)
In a world where information technology is both important and imperfect, organizations and individuals are faced with the ongoing challenge of determining how to use complex, fragile systems in dynamic contexts to achieve reliable outcomes. While reliability is a central concern of information systems practitioners at many levels, there has been limited consideration in information systems scholarship of how firms and individuals create, manage, and use technology to attain reliability. We propose that examining how individuals and organizations use information systems to reliably perform work will increase both the richness and relevance of IS research. Drawing from studies of individual and organizational cognition, we examine the concept of mindfulness as a theoretical foundation for explaining efforts to achieve individual and organizational reliability in the face of complex technologies and surprising environments. We then consider a variety of implications of mindfulness theories of reliability in the form of alternative interpretations of existing knowledge and new directions for inquiry in the areas of IS operations, design, and management.
Sensemaking involves turning circumstances into a situation that is comprehended explicitly in words and that serves as a springboard into action. In this paper we take the position that the concept of sensemaking fills important gaps in organizational theory. The seemingly transient nature of sensemaking belies its central role in the determination of human behavior, whether people are acting in formal organizations or elsewhere. Sensemaking is central because it is the primary site where meanings materialize that inform and constrain identity and action. The purpose of this paper is to take stock of the concept of sensemaking. We do so by pinpointing central features of sensemaking, some of which have been explicated but neglected, some of which have been assumed but not made explicit, some of which have changed in significance over time, and some of which have been missing all along or have gone awry. We sense joint enthusiasm to restate sensemaking in ways that make it more future oriented, more action oriented, more macro, more closely tied to organizing, meshed more boldly with identity, more visible, more behaviorally defined, less sedentary and backward looking, more infused with emotion and with issues of sensegiving and persuasion. These key enhancements provide a foundation upon which to build future studies that can strengthen the sensemaking perspective.
Aircraft carriers, electrical power grids, and wildland firefighting, though seemingly different, are exemplars of high reliability organizations (HROs)--organizations that have the potential for catastrophic failure yet engage in nearly error-free performance. HROs commit to safety at the highest level and adopt a special approach to its pursuit. High reliability organizing has been studied and discussed for some time in other industries and is receiving increasing attention in health care, particularly in high-risk settings like the intensive care unit (ICU). The essence of high reliability organizing is a set of principles that enable organizations to focus attention on emergent problems and to deploy the right set of resources to address those problems. HROs behave in ways that sometimes seem counterintuitive--they do not try to hide failures but rather celebrate them as windows into the health of the system, they seek out problems, they avoid focusing on just one aspect of work and are able to see how all the parts of work fit together, they expect unexpected events and develop the capability to manage them, and they defer decision making to local frontline experts who are empowered to solve problems. Given the complexity of patient care in the ICU, the potential for medical error, and the particular sensitivity of critically ill patients to harm, high reliability organizing principles hold promise for improving ICU patient care.
Communities have the potential to function effectively and adapt successfully in the aftermath of disasters. Drawing upon literatures in several disciplines, we present a theory of resilience that encompasses contemporary understandings of stress, adaptation, wellness, and resource dynamics. Community resilience is a process linking a network of adaptive capacities (resources with dynamic attributes) to adaptation after a disturbance or adversity. Community adaptation is manifest in population wellness, defined as high and non-disparate levels of mental and behavioral health, functioning, and quality of life. Community resilience emerges from four primary sets of adaptive capacities--Economic Development, Social Capital, Information and Communication, and Community Competence--that together provide a strategy for disaster readiness. To build collective resilience, communities must reduce risk and resource inequities, engage local people in mitigation, create organizational linkages, boost and protect social supports, and plan for not having a plan, which requires flexibility, decision-making skills, and trusted sources of information that function in the face of unknowns.
Der vorliegende Beitrag geht der Frage nach, welche Bedeutung Lernprozesse in Einsatzorganisationen haben. Hierzu werden Spezifika dieses Organisationstyps herausgearbeitet und der Zusammenhang zwischen Einsatz und Lernen verdeutlicht. Es wird eine Differenzierung zwischen Einsatz, Extremsituation und Katastrophe vorgenommen, um unterschiedliche Lernanforderungen in Einsatzsituationen darzustellen. Der Autor argumentiert, dass Einsätze – als wesentliches Merkmal von Einsatzorganisationen – Arbeitssituationen darstellen, die durch Flexibilität und Lernförderlichkeit gekennzeichnet sind. Zudem wird der Prozess der Ungewissheitsbewältigung in Einsatzsituationen aus sozialpsychologischer Sicht erläutert.
Das vierte Kapitel widmet sich der Beschreibung der empirischen Erhebung. Die vorliegende Arbeit geht auf Basis einer qualitativen Interviewstudie, die mit 28 Angehörigen aus fünf unterschiedlichen Einsatzorganisationen durchgeführt wurde, der Frage nach, wie Einsatzorganisationen den Transfer von Einsatzwissen managen und wie dieser Wissenstransfer in einen konzeptionellen Bezugsrahmen eingebettet werden kann. So soll die innerhalb des vorangegangenen Abschnitts beschriebene Forschungslücke geschlossen und ein verbessertes Verständnis in Bezug auf die vorliegende Forschungsthematik geschaffen werden.
Purpose
The purpose of this paper is to complicate and critique contemporary scholarship on high-reliability organizations (HROs). This paper argues that although HRO scholarship helps to identify communicative patterns that facilitate reliability and safety, it also simplifies processes that undermine the effectiveness of existing recommendations for HROs.
Design/methodology/approach
This paper frames high-reliability organizing as the enactment of mindfulness, which is the theoretical mechanism behind each of the five principles of high-reliability organizing. Using this framework, this paper then elaborates on each of the HRO principles: preoccupation with failure, reluctance to simplify interpretations, sensitivity to operations, commitment to resilience, and deference to expertise.
Findings
This paper details how research guided by HRO theory must address the following obstacles to safety and resilience: information accessibility limiting preoccupation with failure, identity constructions encouraging the simplification of interpretations, message fatigue repressing sensitivity to operations, the information environment within HROs weakening commitment to resilience, and generational differences impeding deference to expertise.
Originality/value
This paper highlights key issues obstructing safety and reliability in organizations that have been largely ignored by extant literature and encourages scholars to do more to acknowledge the role communication plays in constituting and reconstituting organizational reliability. Failing to fully address complex communicative interactions in HROs obstructs efforts to safeguard employee health and safety.
Organizational performance is often dependent on the timing of critical processes and the simultaneous use of both technology and routines. Existing publications emphasize the importance of time sensitivity but also reflect divergent, untested perspectives. Prior works do not clearly explain or examine how different mechanisms are associated with achieving time-sensitive versus general (or non-time-sensitive) performance. We build on concepts from organizational mindfulness and organizational routines to address these gaps. Specifically, this paper examines how the mindful use of information technologies and adherence to specified routines are associated with both time-sensitive and general organizational performance.We employ split-group structural equation modeling based on high and low levels of information technology adoption to account for potential technology contingencies in performance.We use time-sequenced data from 262 U.S. hospitals to analyze two categories of clinical care quality: time-sensitive care and general care. The results indicate that mindful use of technologies is associated with both time-sensitive and general performance in contexts with high technology adoption but not in those with low adoption. In contrast, adherence to specified routines is associated with time-sensitive performance in contexts with low technology adoption but not in those with high adoption. The results also clarify that high levels of technology adoption and mindful use may at times assume the place of specified routines in their association with time-sensitive performance. Finally, we find evidence that continuous improvement may bridge adherence to specified routines and mindful use of technologies.
The 2002 Battle of Takur Ghar, also known as the Battle on Roberts Ridge, illustrates the challenges of learning from experience in extreme situations. The analysis follows the first hour of the battle and the events leading up to the battle. We propose a four-phase model of how leaders learn to operate effectively in extreme situations and identify the importance of judgment-based learning in extreme situations. Drawing on research from crisis and disaster, organizational resilience, and performance under stress, the events reveal the challenges faced by leaders operating in extreme situations. These challenges include unreliable information, situational novelty, unclear and shifting goals, and ill-structured situations. Three concepts—thrownness, depaysement, and collateral learning—are introduced into the lexicon of leadership in extreme situations to describe how leaders might overcome these challenges. The chapter suggests that the often-quoted statement, “trust your training,” may not be enough to help leaders working in extreme situations and might be augmented with the command “trust your judgment.”
Katastrophenhilfe, das Löschen von Großbränden, Bekämpfung von Terrorismus und organisierter Kriminalität, Auslandseinsätze: die Palette der durch Einsatzorganisationen wie Technisches Hilfswerk (THW), Feuerwehr, Polizei, Rettung und Bundeswehr erbrachten Leistungen umfasst ein weites Spektrum. Gemäß ihrem Auftrag verfügen diese Einsatzorganisationen über ein spezifisches Fähigkeitspotenzial, das im Einsatzfall abrufbereit sein muss.
This paper reveals how routine participants can create recognizability of routine patterns despite interruptions in the performance and multiple ostensives. The research is based on an ethnographic field study analyzing routines in catastrophe management operations. By focusing on microprocesses of routines, the analysis identified several interruptions of routines that had to be worked out before the routine performance could continue. The findings reveal that different modes of communicating influence the process of patterning and performing, thereby creating recognizability. While a narrative mode of practicing supports the process of recognizing patterns while performing the routine, an argumentative mode of practicing helps to overcome an interruption by talking about the routine. Moreover, the findings indicate that performance variety is not only explainable by improving a routine through changing it; performance variety can be the result of undesired interruptions. Nevertheless, the routine performance eventually continues by discussing the problem and actively searching for a problem-solving alternative. Search processes, in this context, are not something separate to routines; the enactment of them is part of performing routines.
This paper examines how routine patterns are recognized as either stable or flexible and which mechanisms are enacted to maintain this patterning work. We address this question through an ethnographic case study analyzing how a catastrophe management organization enacts routines in a highly dynamic setting. Our findings first of all reveal that patterns described by the participants as either stable or flexible were nevertheless both performed differently in each iteration of the routine. Our microlevel analysis shows that to enact patterns that participants perceive as stable, participants had to carry out specific aligning and prioritizing activities that lock-stepped performances. In contrast, participants perceive patterns as flexible when they enact specific selecting and recombining activities. Building on these observations, we add to extant routine literature by (1) differentiating between stability, standardization, flexibility, and change of routines and by (2) providing new insights on mindfulness in accounting for the microlevel activities enacted to orient toward a pattern that enhances standardization or flexibility in dynamic contexts. Moreover, (3) our insights point to the centrality of knowing for the enactment and recognition of patterning work.
High Reliability Organizations (HROs) are organizations with processes that have extremely low failure rates, because the costs of failures are extremely high. According to Weick, Sutcliffe, and Obstfeld (2008) the key aspects of HROs are: preoccupation with failure, reluctance to simplify, and sensitivity to operations, among others. While we understand What the aspects of HROs are, we lack the understanding of How to implement HROs and Why they work. Using a soft research methods approach with Mindfulness techniques, this study demonstrates implementation of HRO in healthcare. In doing so, this research finds that Mindfulness techniques used with Soft Systems Methods provide an effective framework to create HROs. In doing so, this study also discovers a sixth aspect of HROs.
This paper uses data on invoice processing in four organizations to distinguish empirically between two competing theories of organizational routines. One theory predicts that routines should generate patterns of action that are few in number and stable over time, and that atypical patterns of action are driven primarily by exceptional inputs. The competing theory predicts the opposite. By modeling the routines as networks of action and using a first-order Markov model to test for stationarity, we find support for the competing theory. The routines generated hundreds of unique patterns that changed significantly during a five-month period without any apparent external intervention. Changes did not appear to reflect improved performance or learning. Furthermore, we found that exogenous factors (such as large invoices from unusual vendors) are not associated with atypical patterns of action, but endogenous factors (such as the experience of the participants) are. We also found that increased automation can increase variation under some circumstances. These findings offer empirical support for endogenous change in organizational routines and underscore the importance of the sociomaterial context in understanding stability and change.
The factors that compel individuals to exert the extraordinary effort needed to create high reliability—consistent error-free performance under trying conditions—remain unspecified. Here, we propose that when individuals experience emotional ambivalence and prosocial motivation, it induces the broad thinking and other-orientation that undergird mindful organizing and high reliability. Copyright © 2014 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
In this paper, we challenge the traditional understanding of organizational routines as creating inertia in organizations. We adapt Latour's distinction between ostensive and performative to build a theory that explains why routines are a source of change as well as stability. The ostensive aspect of a routine embodies what we typically think of as the structure. The performative aspect embodies the specific actions, by specific people, at specific times and places, that bring the routine to life. We argue that the ostensive aspect enables people to guide, account for, and refer to specific performances of a routine, and the performative aspect creates, maintains, and modifies the ostensive aspect of the routine. We argue that the relationship between ostensive and performative aspects of routines creates an on-going opportunity for variation, selection, and retention of new practices and patterns of action within routines and allows routines to generate a wide range of outcomes, from apparent stability to considerable change. This revised ontology of organizational routines provides a better explanation of empirical findings than existing theories of routines and has implications for a wide range of organizational theories.
Despite the high reliability of current aeronautical technology and safety improvements, human error continues to be a factor in 60% to 80% of all aviation mishaps. Training is often focused on analysis of faulty procedures or lack of procedures over a more systemic approach. This research explores the existence of the psychological construct of shared mindfulness and examines how it is communicatively constructed and enacted in a high-reliability environment. The qualitative study examines shared mindfulness in 10 aviation student dyads in a decision-making crisis situation to identify the communication behaviors of the construct and to determine whether shared mindfulness may lead to more effective pilot decisions. Findings reveal both the existence of shared mindfulness as a communicative construct and seven inductively derived communication process categories that create shared mindfulness in a dyadic situation. Those dyads demonstrating more communication behaviors of shared mindfulness also made the most effective decisions.
Early twentieth-century American pragmatists such as John Dewey placed a strong emphasis on the human faculties of habit and emotion. That contrasts with the emphasis in recent decades on cognitive processes. In contemporary organizational research there has been an increasing interest in recurring action patterns, such as routines and practices. The conceptual difficulties this work has encountered are usefully illuminated by Dewey's view of the primacy of habit and its interplay with emotion and cognition.
Modern communication theory focuses to a disproportionate degree on the cultivation of shared meanings, interpretations, and emotions, and insufficiently on how coordinated action may occur under conditions of minimal self-disclosure and limited consensus. Borrowing a term from music and sports, this article describes characteristics of “jamming” experiences, instances of fluid behavioral coordination that occur without detailed knowledge of personality. Two biases in prior work—individual bias and strong culture bias—are cited as reasons why experiences like jamming have been ignored in the literature. Examples are given of how these experiences strike a balance between autonomy and interdependence, and can even be transcendent. Four preconditions for jamming—skill, structure, setting, and surrender— are also provided. Finally, possibilities for jamming in formal organizations and society are explored.
Summary This study assessed the applicability of current theories of reliability in dynamic settings by exploring the sensemaking processes experienced by a sample of medical residents around lapses in reliability of patient care. Important differences in lapses surfaced, particularly with respect to whether actors were aware that a lapse was occurring in real-time and whether there was anything they could do or say to mitigate or prevent the lapse. In over half of the incidents recounted, the actors did not become aware of the lapse in reliability until after the consequence of the lapse had occurred or the consequence occurred simultaneously with the recognition of the lapse. In other incidents, they faced a critical moment in which they had to decide whether and how to act to intervene in real-time. In the majority of these critical moments, residents had an issue of concern to voice that could have helped mitigate or correct the lapse but instead they remained silent. Issues related to identity and relationships appeared to either inhibit or promote voice during critical moments. We end with ideas for how our findings can inform existing work on reliability in healthcare and the growing literature on voice and silence in organizations. Copyright # 2006 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
In this paper I claim that organizational routines have a great potential for change even though they are often perceived, even defined, as unchanging. I present descriptions of routines that change as participants respond to outcomes of previous iterations of a routine. Based on the changes in these routines I propose a performative model of organizational routines. This model suggests that there is an internal dynamic to routines that can promote continuous change. The internal dynamic is based on the inclusion of routine participants as agents. When we do not separate the people who are doing the routines from the routine, we can see routines as a richer phenomenon. Change occurs as a result of participants' reflections on and reactions to various outcomes of previous iterations of the routine. This perspective introduces agency into the notion of routine. Agency is important for understanding the role of organizational routines in learning and in processes of institutionalization.
THIS REVIEW EXPLORES BOTH ECOLOGICAL THEORY AND THE BEHAVIOR OF NATURAL SYSTEMS TO SEE IF DIFFERENT PERSPECTIVES OF THEIR BEHAVIOR CAN YIELD DIFFERENT INSIGHTS THAT ARE USEFUL FOR BOTH THEORY AND PRACTICE. THE RESILIENCE AND STABILITY VIEWPOINTS OF THE BEHAVIOR OF ECOLOGICAL SYSTEMS CAN YIELD VERY DIFFERENT APPROACHES TO THE MANAGEMENT OF RESOURCES. THE STABILITY VIEW EMPHASIZES THE EQUILIBRIUM, THE MAINTENANCE OF A PREDICTABLE WORLD, AND THE HARVESTING OF NATURE'S EXCESS PRODUCTION WITH AS LITTLE FLUCTUATION AS POSSIBLE. THE RESILIENCE VIEW EMPHASIZES DOMAINS OF ATTRACTION AND THE NEED FOR PERSISTENCE. BUT EXTINCTION IS NOT PURELY A RANDOM EVENT: IT RESULTS FROM THE INTERACTION OF RANDOM EVENTS WITH THOSE DETERMINISTIC FORCES THAT DEFINE THE SHAPE, SIZE AND CHARACTERISTICS OF THE DOMAIN OF ATTRACTION. THE VERY APPROACH, THEREFORE, THAT ASSURES A STABLE MAXIMUM SUSTAINED YIELD OF A RENEWABLE RESOURCE, MIGHT SO CHANGE THESE CONDITIONS THAT THE RESILIENCE IS LOST OR IS REDUCED SO THAT A CHANCE AND RARE EVENT THAT PREVIOUSLY COULD BE ABSORBED CAN TRIGGER A SUDDEN DRAMATIC CHANGE AND LOSS OF STRUCTURAL INTEGRITY OF THE SYSTEM. A MANAGEMENT APPROACH BASED ON RESILIENCE, ON THE OTHER HAND, WOULD EMPHASIZE THE NEED TO KEEP OPTIONS OPEN, THE NEED TO VIEW EVENTS IN A REGIONAL RATHER THAN A LOCAL CONTEXT, AND THE NEED TO EMPHASIZE HETEROGENEITY. THE RESILIENCE FRAMEWORK DOES NOT REQUIRE A PRECISE CAPACITY TO PREDICT THE FUTURE BUT ONLY A QUALITATIVE CAPACITY TO DEVISE SYSTEMS THAT CAN ABSORB AND ACCOMMODATE FUTURE EVENTS IN WHATEVER UNEXPECTED FORM THEY MAY TAKE.
In this research we extend theoretical development about decision making in organizations in which many kinds of errors cannot be tolerated. Catastrophic consequences can be associated with faulty decision making in reliability-seeking organizations, a situation which does not occur in most organizations studied in the past. Observations are drawn from two nuclear-powered aircraft carriers. We find decision processes which appear to change often in these organizations. Important decisions can be made by a number of men even at the lowest levels of the organization. Task-related factors such as technical complexity, high interdependence, and catastrophic consequences associated with rare events and more cognitive factors such as accountability and salience affect decision processes. A model is presented that accounts for dynamic change in decision processes in these organizations.
The concept of collective mind is developed to explain organizational performance in situations requiring nearly continuous operational reliability. Collective mind is conceptualized as a pattern of heedful interrelations of actions in a social system. Actors in the system construct their actions (contributions), understanding that the system consists of connected actions by themselves and others (representation), and interrelate their actions within the system (subordination). Ongoing variation in the heed with which individual contributions, representations, and subordinations are interrelated influences comprehension of unfolding events and the incidence of errors. As heedful interrelating and mindful comprehension increase, organizational errors decrease. Flight operations on aircraft carriers exemplify the constructs presented. Implications for organization theory and practice are drawn.
A landmark in jazz studies, Thinking in Jazz reveals as never before how musicians, both individually and collectively, learn to improvise. Chronicling leading musicians from their first encounters with jazz to the development of a unique improvisatory voice, Paul Berliner documents the lifetime of preparation that lies behind the skilled improviser's every idea. The product of more than fifteen years of immersion in the jazz world, Thinking in Jazz combines participant observation with detailed musicological analysis, the author's experience as a jazz trumpeter, interpretations of published material by scholars and performers, and, above all, original data from interviews with more than fifty professional musicians: bassists George Duvivier and Rufus Reid; drummers Max Roach, Ronald Shannon Jackson, and Akira Tana; guitarist Emily Remler; pianists Tommy Flanagan and Barry Harris; saxophonists Lou Donaldson, Lee Konitz, and James Moody; trombonist Curtis Fuller; trumpeters Doc Cheatham, Art Farmer, Wynton Marsalis, and Red Rodney; vocalists Carmen Lundy and Vea Williams; and others. Together, the interviews provide insight into the production of jazz by great artists like Betty Carter, Miles Davis, Dizzy Gillespie, Coleman Hawkins, and Charlie Parker. Thinking in Jazz overflows with musical examples from the 1920s to the present, including original transcriptions (keyed to commercial recordings) of collective improvisations by Miles Davis's and John Coltrane's groups. These transcriptions provide additional insight into the structure and creativity of jazz improvisation and represent a remarkable resource for jazz musicians as well as students and educators. Berliner explores the alternative waysâaural, visual, kinetic, verbal, emotional, theoretical, associativeâin which these performers conceptualize their music and describes the delicate interplay of soloist and ensemble in collective improvisation. Berliner's skillful integration of data concerning musical development, the rigorous practice and thought artists devote to jazz outside of performance, and the complexities of composing in the moment leads to a new understanding of jazz improvisation as a language, an aesthetic, and a tradition. This unprecedented journey to the heart of the jazz tradition will fascinate and enlighten musicians, musicologists, and jazz fans alike.
Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Delaware, 2004. Principal faculty advisor: Kathleen J. Tierney, Dept. of Sociology. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 245-254).
This paper theoretically and empirically connects the literature on high-reliability organizations (HROs) to a broader set of organizations, which we call reliability-seeking organizations. Unlike HROs, which operate high-hazard technologies, reliability-seeking organizations operate in high-hazard environments. Reliability-seeking organizations are tightly coupled to their unpredictable and complex environments in such a manner that although the human mortality rate is low, the risk of small failures amplifying into organizational mortality is high. To cope with these environments, reliability-seeking organizations organize to remain open and flexible to emerging information and achieve the reliability demanded by their environments—intensity of innovation. These organizations utilize skilled temporary employees, positive employee relations, and an emphasis on training to innovate, and, in turn, generate greater financial performance. We test these hypotheses using a sample of 184 initial public offering (IPO) software firms that conducted their IPO between 1993 and 1996 and our results are consistent with our theorizing. Firms that utilized these human resource practices innovated more frequently and firms with more innovations had higher stock prices over time. Our findings combine to suggest a theoretical model of structural antecedents of a different type of reliability—intensity of innovation Copyright © 2003 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. Peer Reviewed http://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/35038/1/221_ftp.pdf