Serious accidents in high risk, hazardous operations can be prevented through a combination of organizational design, culture, management, and human choice.
[7] At Three Mile Island the technology was tightly coupled due to time-dependent processes, invariant sequences, and limited slack.
Perrow hypothesized that regardless of the effectiveness of management and operations, accidents in systems that are characterized by tight coupling and interactive complexity will be normal or inevitable as they often cannot be foreseen or prevented.
Despite their differences, NAT and HRO theory share a focus on the social and organizational underpinnings of system safety and accident causation/prevention.
Yet other properties such as an organization-wide sense of vulnerability, a widely distributed sense of responsibility and accountability for reliability, concern about misperception, misconception and misunderstanding that is generalized across a wide set of tasks, operations, and assumptions, pessimism about possible failures, redundancy and a variety of checks and counter checks as a precaution against potential mistakes are more distinctive.
Reliability-seeking organizations are not distinguished by their absolute errors or accident rate, but rather by their “effective management of innately risky technologies through organizational control of both hazard and probability” [13](p. 14).
While the early research focused on high risk industries, other expressed interest in HROs and sought to emulate their success.
A key turning point was Karl Weick, Kathleen M. Sutcliffe, and David Obstfeld's [14] reconceptualization of the literature on high reliability.
These researchers systematically reviewed the case study literature on HROs and illustrated how the infrastructure of high reliability was grounded in processes of collective mindfulness which are indicated by a preoccupation with failure, reluctance to simplify interpretations, sensitivity to operations, commitment to resilience, and deference to expertise.
[4] The applications of Crew Resource Management is another area of focus for leaders in HROs requiring competent behavior systems measurement and intervention.