The concept of "High Reliability Organization" (HRO) emerged in the 1980s. HROs operate without error in complex situations, often in industries like aerospace and nuclear. They exhibit eight structural features: hyper-complexity, thin coupling, extreme hierarchy, many decision-makers, high responsibility, frequent feedback, compressed time, and multiple simultaneous results. Five key attitudes improve reliability: concern about errors, reluctance towards simplistic interpretations, operational sensitivity, commitment to resilience, and deference to expertise. These attitudes help organizations manage critical events and maintain operational stability (Roberts, 1990; Weick et al., 1999).
The HROs have original working methods, dominated by an action-oriented approach and a particular way of understanding the complexity of their environment. This requires aptitude in exploiting diversity of group perceptions: variety of interpretations, ideas and arguments differentiation, listening to the other, reconciliation of differences, and the commitment to review and update procedures and modalities action, while maintaining a clear big-picture (Weick, 2004, p.663). Controlling the environment starts with understanding potential incidents and detecting the weak signals that precede them.
Thus, HRO members have an ability to recognize latent errors and remove them before they turn into a crisis. We are talking about organizational resilience.
However, research on HROs generally assumes that their members are essentially the employees of the organizations. The HROs extended to more open organizations than the one originally analyzed. For example, emergency care units, pediatric care units or theatres are organizations that interact with people and the public. Researchers have paid little attention to the ways in which they have managed to include this outsider view in order to ensure situational awareness and 'indigenous' perception in order to secure the activity.
We will try to highlight the role of these people 'external to the organization' in risk mitigation through a series of examples collected during the HRO researches.