第一个,也许最重要的属性是一种文化,它强调严格的可靠性实现。韦克认为,文化与佩罗之间的矛盾需要分散决策,以应付复杂的交互作用以及需要集中决策,以应付紧耦合。文化是指集中的范围内的人共享相同的假设或决定物业,但它给人们在此纬度在特定情况下解释和即兴。 The first and perhaps most important attribute is a culture that emphasises the rigorous achievement of reliability. Weick argued that culture deals with Perrow’s contradiction between the decentralised decision making needed to cope with complex interactions and the centralised decision making needed to cope with tight coupling. Culture means centralisation to the extent that people share the same assumptions or decision premises; but within this it gives people latitude for interpreting and improvising in specific situations.
Culture also provides a way of getting people to comply with rules and norms that improve reliability without monitoring or surveillance. It is a way of ‘embedding’ the priority of reliability in everyday behaviour. And it offers a way of achieving requisite variety. Requisite variety is the principle that a system has to be as complex as its environment: if it is less complex it will have too few ways of responding to the demands of the environment; if it is more http://www.ukassignment.org/fxgllw/ complex, it will incur unnecessary costs. Culture can allow sufficient complexity to evolve, without the restrictions of bureaucratic controls, and can avoid some of the unnecessary complexity of such controls.
An example of this kind of culture given by HRO proponents is the that developed in the US nuclear submarine service by its founder. This involved very intensive training and socialisation processes, and was imposed by an essentially authoritarian individual. It was a culture that stressed vigilance, reliability and perfection.
There are some interesting cases of cultures which are almost the opposite. An example is the culture of civil aviation in its early days, when many of the pilots had been military pilots in one war or another. They sometimes displayed a recklessness that involved unrealistic perceptions of their own invulnerability. And they sometimes promoted very steep authority gradients, where it was very difficult for subordinates to question superiors who made poor decisions.
但也有一些反论据可以是一个有效的高可靠性文化“的概念,即有。其中之一是,你看到了什么样的文化精英的军事组织可能永远不会被复制在其他类型的组织,所以它只是一个有趣的好奇心与其他组织没有特别的经验教训。
But there are some counter-arguments to the notion that there can be an effective ‘high reliability culture’. One is that the kind of culture you see in elite military organizations could never be replicated in other kinds of organization, so it is simply an interesting curiosity with no particular lessons for other organizations. A second is that actually culture doesn’t make people follow common decision premises: they still make up their minds for themselves in the situations they face. A third is that it does not always promote reliability for people to share common assumptions: sometimes it is necessary for people to see things in different ways to avoid complacency and unthinking consensus dominating the way an operation works.
The next quality of HROs is the way the normal structure of authority can change, instantaneously, to adapt to crises, or problems that might lead to crisis. The best example is probably in air traffic control centres. What has been observed is that during routine times there is a normal bureaucratic structure and mode of organization, but in ‘high tempo’ periods, where things are unfolding rapidly, there is a more collegial mode of organizing in which official rank or seniority is ignored. If a particular controller is having problems a group of people can form around him or her, and he or she is effectively the apex of this group, not the person with the most official seniority. Then there is a further mode of organization associated with fully-developed emergencies in which behaviour is effectively practised and pre-programmed.
Similar observations have been made on aircraft carriers where, in certain conditions, the temporary structure of the organization is centred on people with relevant expertise rather than people with high official rank.
Again this helps obtain ‘requisite variety’ – the complexity of responses needed in a system that is faced with a complexity of conditions in its environment. Organizations with rigid structures have, essentially, two few ways, or excessively constrained ways, of reacting to what might be very widely varying challenges. It also helps overcome the ‘authority gradients’ that were discussed earlier when we talked about cultures of reliability. Two of the most significant aviation disasters of the last century – including the worst ever disaster at Tenerife – involved problems with authority gradients where someone low in the official hierarchy could not inform or question someone higher in the hierarchy.
As with the other HRO qualities there are questions about this concept, however. In particular we can ask whether a change in the flow of instructions (from boss-to-subordinate to subordinate-to-boss) is really a change in the structure of authority. We can also ask whether, if there is a genuine change in structure, it is always good. The HRO people decided to look at situation where organizations achieved reliability, not where they failed. If they had looked at both, maybe they would have found flexible structures in both.
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