Everyone loves success and hopes it will continue, but people sometimes make mistakes or misunderstand their situations, and everything goes awry. People and companies make bad choices, and accidents happen, sometimes with dire consequences. However, you and your company can mitigate and manage your risk, build collaborative risk management into your culture, and even prevent some of those consequences if you understand the underlying causes of bad outcomes.

The world has changed dramatically over the past 100 years, from the dominance of cars and airline travel to the internet, with all its upsides and downsides. Dangerous forms of nationalism have arisen and could lead to disruption and conflict. Climate change presents tremendous risk. Still, individuals and organizations are not helpless; they can help mitigate these global risks.“We live in a dangerous world. Many of the things you and I do in our everyday lives – fly in an airplane, get treated in a hospital, or drive a vehicle, for example – bring with them inherent risks.”

Today’s global risks can seem overwhelming, but you can meet them.

“If we are to manage risk optimally, we must take a deeper dive into the realities of socio-technical risk and think differently.”

People and organizations can achieve reliable sustained success.

Sometimes systems fail, whether due to human error or technological or systemic flaws. To manage systems and make them reliable, leaders need to understand how they work both when they are functioning properly and when they fail. “How can we predict and manage system performance? The answer begins with understanding what shapes system performance – the influences that determine the results systems produce.”Systems should optimize their core functions, like making calls or sending email messages, while also heeding the functions they may deem less important.

A system’s design creates the boundaries within which it is reliable.

Leaders must manage and understand their organizations, employees, and systems. They can’t predict the future, but they do have several ways to assess future risks, including investigations, audits, inspections, employee reports, and “predictive risk modeling.” “All methods of seeing and understanding risk have systematic limitations and are subject to human interpretation bias.”

You can predict human and organizational reliability – within limits.

“Highly reliable organizations continuously try to see and understand risk, including internal and external factors influencing their performance.”

Achieving organizational reliability requires a combination of human and systemic factors.

<ul><li class="ql-align-justify">Sustained success over time is the only way to demonstrate reliability.</li><li class="ql-align-justify">Leaders must recognize and understand risks.</li><li class="ql-align-justify">A system’s design creates the boundaries within which it is reliable. </li><li class="ql-align-justify">People are fallible.</li><li class="ql-align-justify">Achieving organizational reliability requires a combination of human and systemic factors.</li><li class="ql-align-justify">You can predict human and organizational reliability – within limits.</li><li class="ql-align-justify">Today’s global risks can seem overwhelming, but you can meet them.</li><li class="ql-align-justify">People and organizations can achieve reliable sustained success.</li></ul>

Key Points

If you strive to be reliable, doing something just once in a while is insufficient – even when you do it well.“To be reliable, high performance must be sustainable.”Reliability isn’t perfection. Mistakes and accidents happen. Unexpected and unpredictable circumstances arise. Even performing solidly over time doesn’t guarantee future flawless performance. The risk of failure doesn’t magically disappear. Whether you are analyzing everyday tasks, creating presentations, flying jets, or performing surgery, the risk of failure is always present.

Sustained success over time is the only way to demonstrate reliability.

Dealing with risk, from your private life to your industry, requires a systematic, scientific approach.  The best ways to address risk vary depending on the particular risk. The hazards in your personal life aren’t the same as hazards facing your company or industry. Use the Sequence of Reliability as a framework in all instances – by discovering and analyzing risk, and managing your systems and people to prevent harm – while varying your hypotheses, analyses, and solutions to fit the scale and circumstances at hand.

Final Closure

To manage an organization’s risk, leaders must pay attention to each level of its operations. Risk management first requires perceiving and grasping the presence of a risk. “One of the biggest challenges you face as a business leader is preparing for hidden risks.”A leader wrestling with multiple competing priorities might miss non-obvious risks. Indeed, sometimes the risks a leader recognizes are just the “tip of the iceberg,” and graver risks remain hidden under the surface.

Leaders must recognize and understand risks.

One of the principal socio-technical risks is a simple, unavoidable fact about human beings: they make mistakes. But, as with system failures, organizations can manage and minimize human failures – if their leaders understand how performance works and what motivates and shapes it.“Most days, the socio-technical combinations of system and human performance produce positive results. Ironically, these same combinations also cause disasters.”

People are fallible.

A Proven Method to Build Resilience and Reliability.

Be prepared for the dangerous and largely unknown risks that threaten your business and learn how to survive and thrive when uncertainty hits.Leaders today must navigate their teams and organizations through unprecedented levels of uncertainty. It feels like every year there is some-game changing technology or catastrophe that gives rise to a “new normal” and sends businesses scrambling for how to rethink themselves to operate under these new conditions. In The Leader’s Guide to Managing Risk, K. Scott Griffith, a former airline pilot, socio-technical physicist, and author of the first independently-audited high reliability and just culture model offers practical and proven methods to build processes that will withstand the winds of uncertainty while driving success. By understanding that organizations are people operating within systems, leaders of all kinds will build reliability and resiliency into their culture and set up their business to withstand the next big changes that come their way.<ul><li> Learn a new way of seeing, understanding, and managing risk.</li><li>Understand how people and systems interact in organizations and how to build processes that increase resilience and performance.</li><li>Collaborate with all stakeholders, including employees, to help you foresee dangers and achieve sustainable reliability.</li><li>Implement proven methods from Scott’s award-winning model that is being used in some of the most prestigious healthcare, EMS, and transportation companies in the world.</li><li>Achieve independent validation of success through certification.</li></ul>