8.3 (Williams and Ishak 2017)
Communication among stakeholders in high reliability organizations (HROs)
organizational discourse: how members make sense of the tragedy by sharing.
critical team in high-hazard organization needs effective communication processes.
HROs are “systems that successfully operate in environments that could produce catastrophic errors.”
3 broad themes from the grounded theory approach appear:
- Emotion
- Some take time off to process the news.
- Some get back to work to cope with the events.
- Some take time off to process the news.
- Sensemaking (why)
- Debriefing process to understand what happened and learn from what happened.
- Purpose of sensemaking:
- How could this have happened? This could happen to any other team. The fatal team was “unlucky”.
- Why has this not happened to our team?
- Debriefing process to understand what happened and learn from what happened.
- Learning (What now?)
- Individual as well as organization(structural changes) can learn
Making changes after a tragedy in the eyes of the crew was a routine event that officials make whenever a tragedy happens regardless.
Staying away from blame
Then the question is if you did find a person’s fault led to the deaths of 19 people, we can you communicate that knowledge to facilitate learning. Moreover, the attitude of the firefighters were reluctant to changes and went back to the basics, maybe because of this blameless culture.Hence, people might blame luck in this situation. Interestingly, this blameless culture also facilitate group cohesion in the HROs.
A reconciliation is to recognize hindsight bias when trying to sensemaking/learning and avoid blaming.
References
Williams, Elizabeth A., and Andrew W. Ishak. 2017. “Discourses of an Organizational Tragedy: Emotion, Sensemaking, and Learning After the Yarnell Hill Fire.” Western Journal of Communication 82 (3): 296–314. https://doi.org/10.1080/10570314.2017.1313446.