Chaos Engineering

Chapter 18. HOP Meets Chaos Engineering

Bob Edwards

What Is Human and Organizational Performance (HOP)?

HOP is an approach to improving organizational structures and functional processes to optimize for business-critical properties such as safety. Perhaps because of its roots in manufacturing, it is often mistaken for a process, but it’s not prescriptive in that sense. There is a flexibility and art to it, based on the five principles outlined in this chapter.

As an approach commonly applied in the manufacturing world, we have an opportunity to learn from Chaos Engineering and incorporate techniques that have shown value in software systems. Both Chaos Engineering and HOP have philosophical roots in what is known as the “new view”¹ philosophy in safety science. This is a fundamental shift in our understanding of accidents, human factors. HOP is an application of new view models to accident investigations and organizational change for the purpose of building safer systems.

Key Principles of HOP

We have taken five key principles that we adapted from research in the Human Performance Technology² field of study and fitted them for practical use in the world of general industry. These principles are our guide to improving operational reliability and resilience in industries such as manufacturing, utilities, chemical, oil and gas, and even the medical world. These five principles are applicable to just about any organization:

• Error is normal.

• Blame fixes nothing.

• Context drives ...