This episode is a recording of an asynchronous lecture/discussion I gave in 2025. I cover the opening narrative in "managing the unexpected" from Karl Weick and Kathleen Sutcliffe. The main theme is how we can comprehend High Reliability Organizations (HROs) using 5 principles. I also look at the airline industry in 2024 as another example. WaMu and the airline collapse in 2024 (as well as the more consequential issues in flight throughout 2025) can comprehensively highlight the five HRO principles: preoccupation with failure, reluctance to simplify, sensitivity to operations, commitment to resilience, and deference to expertise—as decision tools.

Where did WaMu’s early warning signals go?  How did simplifications in the lending story obscure real variance on the ground? Who actually had the right to call the shot when it mattered? Think of this as public science for practitioners: a clear, conversational tour of how reliability is designed (or neglected) in complex systems.

By the end, you’ll have a compact diagnostic you can take to your own understanding of organizations: banks, hospital, government, private industry, and national or international coalitions. I hope this talk provides a sense of how "small misses" is a misguided framing when they seem to always turn into colossal failures if they are not managed as though they were consequential from the outset. 

the original lecture video: https://youtu.be/cTyNHZc9zkQ

cited work: Weick and Sutcliffe - Managing the Unexpected (2nd edition)