by Giulia Lisco, Training Specialist at Excellence Education

In the book entitled “Governing the unexpected: organizations capable of dealing with crises successfully”, Karl Weick and Kathleen Sutcliffe try to identify guidelines for managing critical situations in organizations. By critical situation we mean any unexpected circumstance, characterized by elements that can affect the optimal outcome of an organisation’s activities. According to the authors, accidents are not only attributable to instrumental defects or human error, but are the result of an organizational system in which the technical and human aspects are related to each other. Accidents and crises cannot therefore be attributed to a single cause but are an intrinsic part of the complexity of the system.
In particular, it is interesting to focus on the five principles which, according to the authors, if well managed allow organizations to face the unexpected while continuing to obtain reliable performance. Let’s see them together!

Concern about critical events
This first principle underlines the importance of keeping in mind the possibility of failure. Even with ample safety margins and detailed procedures, it is important to identify and correct errors, missteps, incorrect communications before they turn into real crises: it is therefore necessary to pre-occupy, deal with critical events first.

1. The first step to do this is to be able to identify the weak signals of critical issues. The sooner they are caught, the more options may be available to contain them
2. Then it is essential to discover the critical issues, for example, through a list that indicates the situations and expectations that can contribute to them (changes in supervision, delegated issues that have not received feedback, missed steps in a procedure, etc. .)
3. The third step is to report the critical issues to all those who took part in the implementation of the activity and to those involved in its supervision or are its contact person. This aspect is encouraging because it allows everyone to understand the complexity of a system and to collect useful information to straighten things out.
4. Finally, it is important not to let the expectations of each of us simplify reality and distract from the clear evidence that predicts unexpected problems

Reluctance to simplify
This second principle sheds light on the difficulty we have as human beings in making our mental patterns more complex. We are, in fact, predisposed to simplify the context in which we act, to reduce it to categories, prototypes and so on. To manage unexpected events we are asked to pay attention to multiple elements of the context, to “complicate” it by collecting the first warning signs with potential consequences.
Shared labels, for example, can be risky. Let’s imagine an “empty” petrol container. You may think that it is not dangerous because it no longer contains liquid, in reality it is more dangerous than a “full” container because the remaining vapors are more explosive than petrol itself. If we apply this example to our professional contexts, who knows how many labels could be overcome and managed better. Considering that it is impossible not to use labels and categories, the advice is to try to question them, aware that they are often nothing more than simplifications of reality.

Sensitivity to ongoing activities
This third principle refers to the ability to observe what we are actually doing, the work itself, not simply assuming that ongoing activities are reliable based on our intentions, expectations and plans.
It is difficult to pay attention on a daily basis to every aspect of the work and its most optimal management by all organizational actors. To bridge this gap, it may be useful to develop a collective map of the activities underway at various times during the day, or to consider routine work as anything but an automatic mechanism but rather to think of it as a series of habitual actions which, sometimes, require an adjustment to the situation.

Commitment to resilience
From the perspective of managing the unexpected, being resilient means being fully aware of the errors that have already occurred and correcting them before they cause more serious damage. This involves three skills:
• Absorb effort to maintain functioning despite the presence of adversity
• Recover and recover from unexpected events
• Learn and evolve from previous episodes where resilient practices have been applied

In this proactive and not simply reactive context, people with multiple experiences face critical issues with a richer set of resources and more quickly, since they are guided by the frequency of negative feedback they have experienced. This allows them to create new ways of dealing with unexpected events.

Respect for competence
When an unexpected event begins to emerge, often those who notice it first tend to be low in the hierarchy and often don’t even realize exactly what is happening. Migrant decisions, both upwards and downwards, are based on the fact that competence does not necessarily coincide with hierarchical position and imply that, whoever is able to recognize a specific problem, can make a rapid decision to intervene in effectively, reducing its consequences.
In organizational contexts, it often happens that we are faced with unexpected events that need to be managed quickly and efficiently. These five principles can be seen as a guide to learn to be first of all aware of the complexity of our activities and, subsequently, a suggestion to implement future actions aimed at implementing good management practices.