Positive Psychology at Work:

Moving from Decision-Making to Sense-Making

Weick and Sutcliffe (2007) studied the process of mistake avoidance and correction in inherently risk-heavy organizations. These are organizations where small mistakes can have fatal consequences, such as fire-fighting teams, aircraft carriers and surgical teams. They call these organizations, collectively, high reliability organizations. In these organizations, because of the infinite number of variables that affect outcome, mistakes and errors are pretty much bound to happen; they can't all be ‘planned out’ through tight systems and processes, although these play an important role. Considering these systems, the authors have developed an interesting notion of unexpected events acting as a ruthless ‘audit’ on the organization's capabilities. In other words, it is easy to be misled about the adaptability and capability of your organization when all is well; the true test is what happens when things unexpectedly go wrong. Such events tend to bring areas of unpreparedness and weakness into sharp view. In these ‘high reliability’ organizations things go wrong all the time, yet this ‘going wrong’ doesn't always result in an eventual mistake or error.

Pursuing this interest in how mistakes don't happen in such vulnerable organizations, Weick and Sutcliffe have discovered two very interesting strategies that these organizations use to enable them to keep acting in potentially paralysing situations. They note the general ‘trial-and-error’ nature ...