High Reliability Management is the first book to provide an in-depth and timely look at the people who manage for high reliability--professionals who run critical systems in electricity, water, and transportation. The book tells of the extraordinary challenges that these "reliability professionals" face in ensuring that society's basic systems operate continuously and safely, even in the wake of errors in policy and technical design.
Building a High-Reliability Organization: A Toolkit for Success Gary Sculli, RN, MSN, ATP Douglas E. Paull, MD, FACS, FCCP, CHSE Building a High-Reliability Organization: A Toolkit for Success is a practical guide to becoming a high-reliability organization (HRO). HROs practice the highest standards of patient quality and prevent never events before they occur. In this first-of-its-kind book, written for real-world healthcare professionals on the front lines of patient safety, authors Gary L. Sculli, RN, MSN, ATP, and Douglas E. Paull, MD, FACS, FCCP, CHSE, take the concept of an HRO and break down what it means at the point of care. Through step-by-step instructions and a practical, straightforward approach, they demonstrate how your organization can ensure safe patient care, every day, for every patient. After reading this book, you will: Possess a clear understanding of what constitutes high-reliability healthcare Be able to promote evidence-based, reliable methods to improve safety, including team training, fatigue management systems, and investment in patient safety infrastructure and technology Understand which elements and behaviors must be included in an overall plan to achieve high reliability at the front lines of care Become a transformational leader in your healthcare organization Be able to apply the principles of a fair and just culture to promote the reporting, discussion, and disclosure of adverse events Table of Contents: Preface and Precepts Chapter 1: Situational Awareness Is Fundamental to High Reliability Chapter 2: Situational Awareness Countermeasures Chapter 3: Everyone on the Same Sheet of Music Chapter 4: Yes--You Need to Use the Checklist! Chapter 5: Preoccupation With Failure--It's an Attitude Chapter 6: Recognizing That the Expert Is Not Always the Person in Charge Chapter 7: Lab Coats and Scrubs, Meet Suits and Ties--Sensitivity to Frontline Operations Chapter 8: Just Response to Human Error: A Necessary Component of High-Reliability Organizations Chapter 9: Standardize Communication and Processes to Create Equivalent Actors Chapter 10: Ensuring Technical and Non-Technical Competence
Increasingly, scholars view reliability—the ability to plan for and withstand disaster—as a social construction. However, there is a tendency to evoke this concept only in the face of catastrophes, such as the British Petroleum oil spill or the Space Shuttle Challenger explosion. This book frames reliability as a fundamental issue in the study of organizations—one that can also improve day-to-day operations. Bringing together a diverse cast of contributors, it considers how we can account for the ability of some organizations to maintain high reliability and what we can learn from them. The chapters distinguish reliability from related lines of inquiry; take stock of relevant research from different disciplinary perspectives; highlight implications for practice; and identify directions, questions, and priorities for future research. The first of its kind in over twenty years, this volume delivers a dynamic base of shared knowledge and an integrative research agenda at a time when organizational reliability has never been so important.
This book details the attributes and practices that help high-reliability organizations (HROs) excel in the service they provide to their customers. Explaining what it takes to achieve high reliability in healthcare settings, it presents proven tools and concepts that leading healthcare organizations are using to improve safety and quality. The book identifies the necessary infrastructure, methods, and analytics required to achieve and sustain higher reliability. It also includes case studies that illustrate success stories and failures, so readers can avoid making the same mistakes.
The safe and continued functioning of critical infrastructures—such as electricity, natural gas, transportation, and water—is a social imperative. Yet the complex connections between these systems render them increasingly precarious. Furthermore, though we depend so heavily on interconnected infrastructures, we do not fully understand the risks involved in their failure. Emery Roe and Paul R. Schulman argue that designs, policies, and laws often overlook the knowledge and experiences of those who manage these systems on the ground—reliability professionals who have vital insights that would be invaluable to planning. To combat this major blind spot, the athors construct a new theoretical perspective that reveals how to make sense of complex interconnected networks and improve reliability through management, regulation, and political leadership. To illustrate their approach in action, they present a multi-year case study of one of the world's most important "infrastructure crossroads," the San Francisco Bay-Delta. Reliability and Risk advances our understanding of what it takes to ensure the dependability of the intricate—and sometimes hazardous—systems on which we rely every day.
This book presents a new integrated theory of dynamic management and leadership in one comprehensive approach. It offers a new way of looking at the field, drawing on a wide body of research and practice in the fields of leadership and management, across all sectors in education and more broadly. The book focuses on management against a backdrop of leadership theory. Including examples of practice and application in schools, colleges and universities, it uses a range of historical leadership approaches to scaffold different management techniques that are known to work in effective organisations. It explores the overlap between management and leadership as dynamic theoretical and practical activities, merging the two together into a holistic model that can be applied by managers working in educational settings. Its twenty-six chapters also consider the praxis of educational leadership and management from political, economic and ethical perspectives in relation to issues such as equity and widening participation, and outline how ‘managership’ impacts on student achievement. Offering a unique balance of theory and practice, across school, college and university sectors, the book will be of great interest to researchers, academics, graduate students and practitioners in the field of educational leadership and management, and will be important reading for all stakeholders in the area of educational effectiveness and improvement.
Since the first edition of Managing the Unexpected was published in 2001, the unexpected has become a growing part of our everyday lives. The unexpected is often dramatic, as with hurricanes or terrorist attacks. But the unexpected can also come in more subtle forms, such as a small organizational lapse that leads to a major blunder, or an unexamined assumption that costs lives in a crisis. Why are some organizations better able than others to maintain function and structure in the face of unanticipated change? Authors Karl Weick and Kathleen Sutcliffe answer this question by pointing to high reliability organizations (HROs), such as emergency rooms in hospitals, flight operations of aircraft carriers, and firefighting units, as models to follow. These organizations have developed ways of acting and styles of learning that enable them to manage the unexpected better than other organizations. Thoroughly revised and updated, the second edition of the groundbreaking book Managing the Unexpected uses HROs as a template for any institution that wants to better organize for high reliability.
Integrating development processes, policies, and reliability predictions from the beginning of the product development lifecycle to ensure high levels of product performance and safety, this book helps companies overcome the challenges posed by increasingly complex systems in today’s competitive marketplace. Examining both research on and practical aspects of product quality and reliability management with an emphasis on applications, the book features contributions written by active researchers and/or experienced practitioners in the field, so as to effectively bridge the gap between theory and practice and address new research challenges in reliability and quality management in practice. Postgraduates, researchers and practitioners in the areas of reliability engineering and management, amongst others, will find the book to offer a state-of-the-art survey of quality and reliability management and practices.