Organizational culture is believed to be developed as a patterned set of shared beliefs and expectations. Often, the definition of culture ends here. In fact, however, culture also includes a repertoire of capacities for action that shapes how individuals and groups detect, manage, and learn from the unexpected. In their volume, “Managing the Unexpected (2007), Weick and Sutcliffe maintain that culture is about practices and actions as much as it is mind-sets.
Weick and Sutcliffe study High Reliability Organizations (HROs). These are organizations that “function reliably without severe harm, despite operating in settings where the potential for error and disaster is overwhelming.” The term was originally coined by Berkeley researchers Karlene Roberts, Gene Rochlin, and Todd LaPorte to describe organizations such as nuclear aircraft carriers, air traffic control, emergency medicine, and nuclear power generation plants that tend to perform effectively under conditions of extreme risk.
They argue that a “mindfulness” exists among this type of organization and that this attribute is deeply intertwined with organizational culture, emphasizing that it “must be treated as a culture as well as a set of principles that guide practice.” A mindful culture is one that fosters “a rich awareness of discriminatory detail” and “ongoing scrutiny of existing expectations” throughout the organization.
The five principles of mindfulness, crucial for creating a mindful infrastructure in organizations and enabling resilient performance in an environment of uncertainty, are:
Beyond specific beliefs, culture is reflected in the characteristic ways of knowing and sensemaking within an organization. Specifically, it dictates “how we develop expectations around here.” Tragic events, or “lessons bought in blood,” can be occasions for significant culture change, as organizations test the limits of performance and institutionalize the results into revised practices and assumptions.
And in contrast to this notion of mindfulness, mindlessness in organizations occurs primarily due to the inherent human tendency to confirm existing expectations, coupled with the rigidities of routines, plans, and the impact of various organizational and environmental factors. Mindlessness is characterized by a mental style where people follow recipes, impose old categories to classify what they see, act with rigidity, operate on automatic pilot, and mislabel unfamiliar new contexts as familiar old ones.
Expectations, while essential for organizing and predictability, can significantly cause trouble by creating blind spots that hinder the detection and management of unexpected events. So, while expectations provide necessary order and predictability, their inherent biases and rigidities can lead to mindlessness, making organizations vulnerable to unforeseen disruptions and catastrophic outcomes. Here’s how expectations can lead to problems:
Confirmation Bias and Biased Search for Evidence. People tend to actively seek out evidence that confirms their existing expectations and avoid or disqualify information that disconfirms them. This inherent human tendency leads to:
Routines and Plans as Expectation Traps. Organizations often assume that having routines demonstrates an understanding of problems. However, routines are also expectations susceptible to the same traps as any other expectation, as they assume the world today is similar to when the routine was first learned.
Plans guide a narrow search for confirmation that the plans are correct, leading people to avoid disconfirming evidence. Much like expectations, plans can be understood as assumptions that guide choices and hypotheses waiting to be tested. This preoccupation with plans can make mindful action difficult. Plans also undercut organizational functioning by specifying contingent actions that restrict attention to what is expected and limit the present view of capabilities, thereby precluding improvisation.
The presumption that consistent high-quality outcomes can be produced by repeating past patterns is flawed, as routines often cannot handle novel events. This leads to a loss of flexibility.
Concealing Small Errors and Escalation. A strong reliance on a simple set of expectations means that unusual events can develop to serious levels before they are even noticed. This allows small errors to grow into disabling problems. If organizations are slow to realize their expectations are wrong, problems worsen, become harder to solve, and entangle with other issues.
Normalization of Deviance. Expectations contribute to the inadvertent trivialization and “normalization” of unexpected events. What is initially treated as an unexpected event is redefined as an acceptable or normal occurrence, leading to a dangerous erosion of safety margins and increasing vulnerability.
Origin of Surprise. There are three forms of unexpected events:
The initial surprise starts with a violated expectation. If these expectations are held too strongly, they postpone the realization that the model of the world has limits, leading to fewer options to resolve the problem once it becomes undeniable.
Mindlessness, characterized by automatic pilot behavior, a biased search for confirming evidence, and the imposition of old categories, inherently resists change and masks problems. It creates significant barriers to adapting to the unexpected and learning from events. Mindfulness, as “a rich awareness of discriminatory detail” and a continuous updating of understanding, on the other hand, provides a blueprint for effective organizational change management, especially in complex and uncertain environments. It shifts the focus from merely reacting to crises to actively cultivating an organizational capacity to anticipate, contain, and learn from the unexpected.
Mindfulness and mindlessness are crucial concepts that deeply inform the practice of organizational change management. Weick and Sutcliffe emphasize that mindfulness “must be treated as a culture as well as a set of principles that guide practice.” Essentially, change management geared towards high reliability involves shifting an organization from tendencies of mindlessness to a state of sustained mindfulness.
Sources:
Weick, K. & Sutcliffe, K. (2007). “Managing the Unexpected: Resilient Performance in an Age of Uncertainty”. Second Edition. San Francisco, CA: John Wiley & Sons, Inc.