Towards High Reliability Organisations for foreign policy?

by Alex Evans | Jul 7, 2007 | Cooperation and coherence, Global system, Influence and networks

George Packer at the New Yorker has a terrific post asking why it is that bad news rarely seems to permeate to the top of organisations, and why those at the top often seem to know less than everyone else. He writes: “At different stages of the war, I’ve had different theories, and have sometimes held them all simultaneously:

1. They’re lying. They don’t tell the truth in public—bad for morale, bad for them—but they know.

2. Bad news doesn’t get to the top. According to Sy Hersh in this week’s New Yorker, that was General Antonio Taguba’s initial explanation for why Donald Rumsfeld claimed not to know about Abu Ghraib long after he could have read the General’s investigative report: his underlings kept it from the boss, fearing his wrath.

3. They don’t want to know, so they insulate themselves from bad news. Hersh reported that this was the real reason for Rumsfeld’s ignorance about the details of the Abu Ghraib abuses: he refused to read the report.

4. They hear bad news and then immediately dismiss it. George Tenet, on page 447 of his new memoir, offers this bit of evidence: “As early as the fall of 2003, it was becoming clear that our political and economic strategy was not working. The data were available, the trends were clear. Those in charge of U.S. policy operated within a closed loop. Bad news was ignored.”

There’s an important link here to management literature about a particular class of organisations called High Reliability Organisations – places like nuclear power stations or aircraft carrier flight decks that are both (a) inherently unsafe and yet (b) tend to have very good safety records. (For an excellent discussion of HROs, see Managing the Unexpected by Karl Weick and Kathleen Sutcliffe).

One of the features that such organisations tend to share is a preoccupation with failure, which is seen as an opportunity for learning. Weick and Sutcliffe note that,

Research shows that people need to feel safe to report incidents or they will ignore them or cover them up. Managerial practices such as encouraging questioning and rewarding people who report errors or mistakes strengthen an organisationwide culture that values reporting.

The reason: any lapse is seen within an HRO as “a signal of possible weakeness in other portions of the system”. What’s so striking about HROs’ preoccuptation with failure is that governments and foreign policy agencies tend to be organised along diametrically opposite lines: they are pathologically preoccupied with success. Junior officials in government agencies often find themselves under pressure, whether implied or explicit, to report “good news stories” up the information food chain, in order to show that the current approach is working.

While senior policymakers will, inevitably, always want to have good news to tell the outside world, it’s crucial to ensure that internal communications give the unvarnished truth – and that, in turn, relies on clear signals to officials that they will be rewarded for telling it like it is. None of this will come as news to good ministers. Conversely, a failure to remember it lies at the very heart of why the US and UK went to war in Iraq.