Managing the Unexpected: Resilient Performance in an Age of Uncertainty, Second Edition

Chapter 1. Managing the Unexpected: What Business Can Learn from High Reliability Organizations

Unexpected events often audit our resilience. They affect how much we stretch without breaking and then how well we recover. Some of those audits are mild. But others are brutal. This book is about both kinds of audits, as unrecognized mild audits often turn brutal.

Consider some examples. People did not expect that Pentium computer chips would make incorrect calculations, that a new soft drink formula would unleash protests rather than praise, that bottled water would be tainted with benzene, that fresh spinach would cause serious illness, that pet food would be tainted with poison, that patients supposedly suffering from St. Louis encephalitis were ...