High reliability organizations (HROs) are 100% fully committed to resilience. Resilience is defined as the capacity to quickly recover or "bounce back" from difficulties. By their very nature, HROs are highly complex and tightly coupled. In other words, these organizations are highly interdependent - a small error in one part of the organization can impact a completely separate part of the organization. Furthermore, these small errors are often compounded and magnified. HROs also exist in unforgiving environments where learning by experimentation is often neither feasible or safe. In reality, by developing resilient systems with multiple back-ups and mitigation plans, HROs have made themselves even more complex and more tightly coupled!
When I think of resilience, I am drawn to a particular quote by the martial artist, television and movie celebrity, and philosopher, Bruce Lee. Lee used the analogy of water in one of his most famous quotes ("Be like water my friend"). The quote actually comes from a very short-lived TV series, "Longstreet" in which Lee explained one of the tenets of his philosophy of Gung Fu. He explains how he came to this analogy:
After spending many hours meditating and practicing, I gave up and went sailing alone in a junk. On the sea I thought of all my past training and got mad at myself and punched the water! Right then — at that moment — a thought suddenly struck me; was not this water the very essence of gung fu? Hadn’t this water just now illustrated to me the principle of gung fu? I struck it but it did not suffer hurt. Again I struck it with all of my might — yet it was not wounded! I then tried to grasp a handful of it but this proved impossible. This water, the softest substance in the world, which could be contained in the smallest jar, only seemed weak. In reality, it could penetrate the hardest substance in the world. That was it! I wanted to be like the nature of water.
Suddenly a bird flew by and cast its reflection on the water. Right then I was absorbing myself with the lesson of the water, another mystic sense of hidden meaning revealed itself to me; should not the thoughts and emotions I had when in front of an opponent pass like the reflection of the birds flying over the water? This was exactly what Professor Yip meant by being detached — not being without emotion or feeling, but being one in whom feeling was not sticky or blocked. Therefore in order to control myself I must first accept myself by going with and not against my nature.
Professor Yip was Lee's martial arts instructor before he became famous. Yip taught Lee the Chinese philosophy Wing Chun, which he adapted into his own philosophy of Gung Fu. It really is a beautiful metaphor for resilience:
Be like water making its way through cracks. Do not be assertive, but adjust to the object, and you shall find a way around or through it. If nothing within you stays rigid, outward things will disclose themselves.
Empty your mind, be formless. Shapeless, like water. If you put water into a cup, it becomes the cup. You put water into a bottle and it becomes the bottle. You put it in a teapot, it becomes the teapot. Now, water can flow or it can crash. Be water, my friend.
High reliability organizations are like that. They adapt to their circumstances. They roll with the punches, so to speak. They can be anything at anytime, as circumstances dictate. "Be water, my friend."
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