High-reliability organisations

Perrow represents a rather pessimistic view of the operators and maintenance personnel s ability to maintain a safe state in high-technology systems involving major accident risks. Experience shows, however, that some organisations are able to sustain failure-free operation of such systems. Studies of so-called high-reliability organisations (HRO) have identified three aspects characterising such systems in particular (LaPorte and Consolini, 1991 Reason, 1997 Rijpma, 1997). 

The first strategy is based on similar principles to those discussed in Section 

Finally, the HRO maintains conceptual slack to be able to handle new situations and to facilitate learning from experience. Multiple theories on the technology and the production process are maintained simultaneously among the operators. In critical situations, they negotiate a course of action in order to avoid hasty inappropriate actions. This strategy becomes problematic if the production process deteriorates rapidly and time is too short to allow for discussions to agree on a proper course of action. 

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Hayes, J. (2009a) Incident reporting A nuclear industry case study , in A. Hopkins (ed.) Learning from High Reliability Organisations. CCH Sydney. 

La Porte, T.R. (1996) High reliability organisations Unlikely, demanding and at risk. Journal of Contingencies and Crisis Management, 4, 60-71. 

La Porte, T.R. and Consolini, P.M. (1991) Working in practice but not in theory -theoretical challenges of high reliability organisations. Journal of Public Administration Research Theory, 1, 1-21. 

Roberts, K.M. (1990) Some characteristics of high reliability organisations. Organisation Science, 1, 160-177. 

A high reliability organisation has been defined as one that produces product relatively error-... 

The following factors should be addressed to achieve a high reliability organisation ... 

To demonstrate the importance of culture and leadership in the delivery of a high reliability organisation, PSLG has published Principles of Process Safety Leadership. The principles can be found in Appendix 7 of this report. They should be adopted by individual dutyholders. Further guidance is provided in Appendix 5. 

Recommendation 19 identified a number of high reliability organisational factors that were of particular importance in the context of the Buncefield investigation. 

Clear understanding and definition of roles and responsibilities, and assurance of competence in those roles, are essential to achieve high reliability organisations for the control of major accident hazards. 

Updated Part 5 Cperating with high reliability organisations - Introduotion... 

In aviation, the taxonomy called Human Factors Analysis and Classification System (HFACS) has been established see Shappell Wiegmann (2000), to understand accidents based on several factors than mere human error. The HFACS taxonomy are based on the Swiss Cheese Model from Reason (1997), looking at accidents as unsafe acts based on preconditions, unsafe conditions and organisational influences, in order to avoid blaming the human element. However, the HFACS method has no exploration of resilience, and should be extended to cover resilient acts, based on preconditions of resilience, resilient conditions and High Reliable Organisational influences. 

Although the Safety Management System (and the Safety Management Organisation in place to deliver it) and safety cirlture are intrinsically linked, the two are addressed separately below simply for the sake of clarity. The chapter concludes with a short introduction to the notions of organisational maturity and high reliability organisations . These concepts show how selected companies in other domains have addressed similar issues. 

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