Real-World Reliability: How high-reliability teams build resilience instead of chasing zero errors.

• Date: 01 June 2024
• Author: Mazulewicz, Jake

Wildland firefighters. Air traffic controllers. Flight deck crews of Navy aircraft carriers. Operators of nuclear power plants and the national bulk electric grid. These are among the safest and most reliable work teams in the world. And they don't try to eliminate all errors and surprises.

Decades of experience have shown that the crusade to eliminate every error is both impractical and unwise. So, what do high-reliability work teams do instead? They operate so that errors and surprises don't disable them. Instead of being brittle or fragile, these teams seek to build resilience.

In the past 30 years, researchers have discovered a few unusual traits that high-reliability organizations share. For example, they tend to trust the workers with the most expertise, not the most status. They also tend to respect the complex, often sticky ground truth of how work actually gets done, instead of trying to oversimplify and "proceduralize" everything. And of course, highreliability organizations seek to build resilience.

Many of the articles and books on highreliability organizations were written by academics--and perhaps even for academics. The result? A lot of confusion about exactly how to turn high-reliability organizations theory into real-world practice. Many modern front-line teams in electric power utilities, gas and oil, renewable energy...