Mindfulness on US Navy aircraft carrier

This wiki article serve as an example for Organisational resilience with mindfulness

This wiki-page is a direct quotation of the book: Managing the Unexpected: Assuring High Performance in an age of Complexity by Karl E. Weick and Kathleen M. Sutcliffe.

"Mindfulness is not some kind of unattainable ideal. HRO’s are living testimony that mindfulness can be attained and that it need net reduce production. Take the case of carriers. Their flight operations incorporate the same five processes of mindfulness that we find I other HRO’s. These are the same five processes that were in short supply at the Union Pacific [The railroad company from the examples in the five principles].

First, people on carriers are preoccupied with failure. Every landing is graded and the grades are used to improve performance. Every landing is also televised throughout the ship so that everyone else performs. Near misses are debriefed within the hour and everyone is required to write down what they saw and heard prior to the incident. Small failures such as a plane in the wrong position on a full deck or a pilot’s continued inability to snag the third arresting wire when landing are treated as signs of potential, larger problems within the system such as poor communication among deck handlers or inadequate training protocols for the Air Wing. Second, people on carriers are reluctant to simplify. They take nothing for granted. They do not assume that any aircraft is ready for launch until it has been checked in multiple was by redundant inspections. Hand signals, voice signals, and colored uniforms are used to convey information about who is responsible for what. If a pilot whose plane is positioned on catapult for launch is then told to reduce engine power, he won’t do so for fear of being launched at reduced power into the ocean. He keeps full power on until the catapult officer walks directly in front of his plane and stands directly over the two million horsepower catapult and signals that he should reduce power. Of course the catapult officer will not do that until he visually confirms that the catapult is safe and he can’t be fired.

Third, People on carriers maintain continuous sensitivity to operations. Officers from the captain on down are in continuous communication during flight operations and exchange information about the status if the activity. The entire ship is attuned to launching and recovering aircraft. The captain, who is on charge of the carrier, and the commander of the Air Wing, who is in charge of the aircraft, are positioned physically to observe all steps of the operations. Insensitivity to operations was clearly evident in a near miss that could have been catastrophic. The carrier was running at high speed in heavy seas when a request was made that is slow down so that aircraft could be moved from the flight deck down to the hanger deck on the deck edge elevator. The ship had other priorities and did not slow down immediately. Growing impatient and thinking the seas has calmed down, the deck officer ordered the elevator lowered. Seven men and an aircraft were washed overboard. All were rescued, itself an amazing fact.

Fourth, people on carriers have a commitment to resilience. Crews know the importance of routines and predictable behavior as, well as doing what they are told. They also know that no one understands the technology, the situation, or the people completely, so surprises are inevitable. And with surprise comes the necessity to improvise, make do with the hand you are dealt, adapt, think on your feet, and contain and bounce back from unexpected events. For example, when Dick Martin, the first captain on carrier Carl Wilson, found himself in an intense storm off the coast of Virginia in 1983, the winds were so strong that he drove the carrier at ten knots in reverse in order to reduce the speed of the winds across the deck and allow the aircraft to land more safely. Rochlin describes a maximum strike launch in which the first aircraft to be put on the catapult malfunctioned and could not be cleared from the catapult. The entire launch had to be reconfigured, and this necessitated the launch of an additional refueling tanker, new strategies for the raid, and new emergency fields. The reconfiguration was finished in less than ten minutes. Resilience like this is possible because people on carriers have dep knowledge of technologies, people, and capabilities.

And fifth, people on carriers maintain deference to expertise. The boss of an air squadron who knows the quirks of his own pilots may momentarily override higher ranking officers in the tower and decide how planes will be landed when a member of his squadron loses hydraulics while attempting to land. Despite their success in avoiding costly mistakes, no one on a carrier understands carrier operations perfectly or with complete certainty. But the same holds true in any HRO. And it certainly holds true for any organization you’ve ever been part of. What this means is that it is impossible to manage any organization solely by means of mindless control systems that depend on rules, plans, routines, stable categories, and fixed criteria for correct performance. No one knows enough to design such a system so that it can cope with dynamic environment. Instead, designers who want to hold dynamic systems together have to organize in ways that evoke mindful work. People have to find it easy and natural and rewarding to adopt a style of mental functioning whereby they include, as part of their job description, the responsibility to engage in continuous learning as well as ongoing refinement and updating of emergent expectations. Carriers are guided as much by enlightened, updated expectations as they are by computation and analytic targets. If you want to manage the unexpected more skillfully, you would do well to follow the lead of carriers, where significant effort is invested in mindfulness, and significant penalties are assessed for mindfulness."