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A response to todd la porteand paula consoliniRichard W. Hug aa Division of Public & Environmental Affairs& Political Science , Indiana University-Northwest , 46408, Gary, Indiana, 3400BroadwayPublished online: 26 Jun 2007.

To cite this article: Richard W. Hug (1998) A response to todd la porte and paulaconsolini, International Journal of Public Administration, 21:6-8, 853-855, DOI:10.1080/01900699808525321

To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/01900699808525321

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INT'L. J . OF PUB. ADMIN., 21(6-8), 853-855 (1998)

A RESPONSE TO TODD LA PORTE AND PAULA CONSOLINI

IS THERE HOPE FOR THE ERROR PRONE ORGANIZATION?: THE MYSTERY OF HROs

Richard W. Hug Division of Public & Environmental Affairs

& Political Science Indiana University-Northwest

3400 Broadway Gary, Indiana 46408

La Porte and Consolini suggest a frightening scenario-that more high reliability organizations (HROs) must be designed and made operational in order for organizations to remain economically competitive. More HROs must be developed but hopes for creating them by way of innovation or technology transfer must be cautious, they say. The scene includes more HROs-with possibly catastrophic failures looming-but less confidence that we really understand how existing HROs have managed to operate without failures.

There is, however, no need to make the situation more frightening than necessary. La Porte and Consolini's comments on our ability to provide design advice on the basis of existing organi- zation theory are frightening enough. HROs appear to be occupy- ing a status described by Walter Heller, in which they obviously work in practice but there is some question as to whether or not they can work in theory.

Copyright 0 1998 by Marcel Dekker, Inc

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La Porte and Consolini warn us that HROs are special sorts of organizations with very special sorts of (technological) problems and with very high levels of resources devoted to maintaining their "nearly error free" operations. They would argue that opportunities for transferring our knowledge of HROs to the EPO (Error-Prone Organization) setting are likely to be limited. It is unlikely that any government will commit the resources needed to create the "nearly error-free" welfare department. This would be the case even if the problems faced by welfare departments were "technological" rather than social and personal. Then again, there is the nagging problem that existing HROs were not really designed to do what they do- they just grew.

Where, then, does this leave the inhabitants of EPOs? Work- ing with limited resources, watching helplessly for embryonic nested authority structures to save them from the high-tech hazards that will creep into their work? Is there no hope for improving EPOs, no way to understand and tap into the magic that makes HROs so successful?

Ironically, there are important links between La Porte and Consolini's work on HROs and John DiIulio's paper on three error-prone organizational settings-schools, prisons, and armies. La Porte and Consolini appear to be engaged in the type of re- search that DiIulio advocates and calls "behaviorally informed formalism." La Porte and Consolini observe first-hand how mem- bers of the HROs "really behave" and relate these observations to the formal character of the organizations in which they operate. The HROs that they study are "successful," like DiIulio's "effec- tive schools, " "well-governed prisons, " and "winning armies. " La Porte and Consolini's HROs are different from other types of organizations. DiIulio's successful EPOs differ in striking ways from their unsuccessful counterparts.

Two themes, however, underlie the successes described in both papers: cohesiveness and a sense of mission. DiIulio writes

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RESPONSE TO LA PORTE AND CONSOLINI 855

of stable teams of like-minded executives in prisons, cohesive staffs with a sense of professional mission in schools, and the high degree of unit cohesion that characterizes combat-effective armies. La Porte and Consolini make it clear that inhabitants of HROs are devoted to their error-free missions and are committed to working together effectively even in the face of organizational barriers.

To prescribe the cultivation of cohesiveness and a sense of mission for all organizations, however, is to oversimplify the prob- lem and to ignore some troubling inconsistencies. For example, DiIulio uncovers the public-management variable and shows that it matters. La Porte and Consolini seem to suggest that HROs operate well in spite of the way they are put together. Perhaps the more important lesson lies in the approach used by both sets of researchers, namely, the study of successful organizations using participant observation as well as other empirical techniques- finding out what makes them work and writing about it coherently.

The research agendas proposed by DiIulio and by La Porte and Consolini's Berkeley group are ambitious. That's good. Designers need all the help they can get.

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