Interventions and Measurements of Highly Reliable/resilient Organization Implementations: A Literature Review

Since the inception of High Reliability Theory in 1981, researchers and practitioners have theorized about the questions, “How do you know if you're an HRO, and how do you validate it?” Evidence now exists that organizations seeking high reliability and resilience have moved away from the theoretical phase, and into the application phase where organizations adopt the HRO hallmarks plus culture as operational targets and create interventions to effect change. The evidence of high reliability operations in organizations is key for validating that HRO is implementable and is also beneficial. After collecting over 1400 artifacts, we found 34 scholarly efforts published which purposefully targeted implementation measures toward achieving an HRO state and measured the outcomes. From that evidence, we concluded that three specific interventions have been used which were useful and generalizable to guide practitioners in moving toward an HRO state: process redesign, training, and organization redesign. We suggest that this evidence may assert that organizations which are not functioning as an HRO can be redesigned to do so.