High-reliability organizations create the safest and most effective operations and then constantly re-assess for any possibility of failure before an incident occurs, including near-miss events. High-reliability principles are: Preoccupation with failure, reluctance to simplify, sensitivity to operations, deference to expertise and commitment to resilience.
These often come across as abstract concepts. How is preoccupation with failure displayed? How is sensitivity to operations shown? If an organization has hardwired chains of command, how do these teams defer to expertise when that expert is not the ranking person on the scene? (Christianson, Sutcliff et al., 2011). How does high-reliability become operationalized?