Managing the Unexpected: Sustained Performance in a Complex World, 3rd Edition

Chapter 2The Infrastructure of Mindful Organizing

“Organizing tries to ensure that different things are where we expect them to be.”¹

—Yiannis Gabriel

Often, things are not where we expect them to be. When that happens we strive for “a minimum of jolt, a maximum of continuity.”² That takes a lot more than failure, simplification, operations, resilience, and expertise (FSORE). It takes an infrastructure that supports sensemaking, continuous organizing, and adaptive managing. We lump these three together under the more general label mindful organizing, which, for us, means essentially the same thing as high reliability organizing. In both cases we want to convey the image that reliable organizations are sensitive to and constantly adjust to ...