Organisational Report

reverse decisions, and the organization can become ‘path dependent’ getting locked, it loses its capability to adopt better alternatives (Sydow, Schreyogg and Koch, 2009). Preventative control is diminished over time. Reason (1990) argued that each defensive layer is like a slice of Swiss cheese, having many holes. The holes in the defences arise because of latent problems (Reason, 1990), such as defective maintenance, poor training, when local practice takes over from written procedure (Snook, 2000) and ‘deviant acts’ become normalized (Vaughan, 1996). When the holes in many layers momentarily line up, an incident can occur. Mindful action is weakened when organizations stop investing in the competence of their people, maintaining efficacy and encouraging growth (Sutcliffe and Vogus, 2003), as well as the structures and practices people become inattentive (Simons and Chabris, 1999), become mindless (Langer, 1989) and lose situational awareness (Klein, 2008). In hierarchical organizations those with expertise who are closest to the problem are not empowered to act (Weick and Sutcliff, 2007) and people diffuse responsibility for taking action (Latané and Darley, 1970). Organizational Resilience can be undermined as these factors can combine to create blind drift and organizations can sleepwalk into disaster. Once failure does occur most organizations respond by bolstering preventative control by adding new safeguards, reinforcing barriers and redoubling training efforts but rarely engage in fundamental changes to the adaptive innovation or mindful action aspects of resilience (Denyer and Pilbeam, 2015)

In hierarchical organizations those with expertise who are closest to the problem are not empowered to act

Organizational Resilience | BSI and Cranfield School of Management

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