The instinct to exhort people to do their best work in challenging times is understandable. It’s tempting to believe that if we just hunker down, we can avoid failure altogether. It’s also wrong. The relationship between effort and success is imperfect. The world around us changes constantly and keeps presenting us with new situations. The best-laid plans encounter problems in an uncertain context. Even when people work hard and are committed to doing the right thing, failure is always possible in a new situation. Sure, sometimes failures are caused by people who are careless or don’t work hard, but even hard work can end in failure when a situation is new and different or some unexpected event happens. Finally, and most perversely, sometimes sheer luck allows you to mail it in and succeed anyway.

Idiosyncratic failures in complex technology. But as before, look more closely and you will see some of the usual culprits defining complex failure: multiple causes in a reasonably familiar setting, with its false sense of security; missed signals; and interactive complexity in a shifting business environment. At times I simply cannot bear the frequency of this recurring story. My research has shed light on why it happens—on the cognitive, interpersonal, and organizational causes that make complex failures so thorny. This multiplicity of factors also means you have many levers with which to interrupt the otherwise inexorable flow toward failure. It means that any one of us can become a complex-failure preventer.

My engineering background had made me a fan of Perrow’s groundbreaking book Normal Accidents, first published in 1984, which had a lasting influence on experts’ thinking about safety and risk. Perrow focused on how systems, rather than individuals, produce consequential failures. The importance of that distinction cannot be underestimated. Understanding how systems produce failures—and especially which kinds of systems are especially failure-prone—helps take blame out of the equation. It also helps us to focus on reducing failure by changing the system rather than by changing or replacing an individual who works in a faulty system.

The problem with Perrow’s idea that organizations could not safely function with interactive complexity and tight coupling was that so many such organizations did in fact function without mishap for years, even decades. Nuclear power plants operated without incident nearly all the time. So did air traffic control systems, nuclear aircraft carriers, and a host of other inherently risky operations. A small group of researchers led by Karlene Roberts at the University of California, Berkeley, set out to study how they did it. What they discovered was more behavioral than technical. The term high reliability organization, or HRO, captures the essence of the theory. HROs are reliably safe because of how they make everyone in them feel accountable to one another for practices that consistently catch and correct

deviations to prevent major harm. Vigilance is one word for it. But it’s more than that. To me the most interesting part of HRO research is the observation that rather than downplaying failure, people in HROs are obsessed with failure. My colleagues Karl Weick, Kathie Sutcliffe, and David Obstfeld wrote a seminal paper highlighting the culture of HROs as preoccupied with failure, reluctant to simplify, acutely sensitive to ongoing operations (quick to detect subtle unexpected changes), committed to resilience (catching and correcting error,

rather than expecting error-free operations), and valuing expertise over rank. In other words, HROs are weird places. Rather than holding back to see what the boss is thinking, people there don’t hesitate to speak up immediately. A frontline associate, to avert a crisis, can tell the CEO what to do. Failure is clearly seen as an ever-present risk that can nonetheless be consistently averted.

Embracing the Possibility of Failure to Reduce the Occurrence of Failure

My decades-long fascination with error, harm, and failure has left me humble about the complexity of these topics. The mix of factors—technology, psychology, management, systems—means none of us can master every aspect of the relevant knowledge to feel “we’ve got this.” But a few simple practices have emerged from my work that can help prevent complex failures. With these, we all have the power to make that kind of difference—in our own lives and in the organizations we care about.