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AbstractThis essay argues for the importance of error as an organizing concept in the management of hazardous technical systems to high levels of reliability and safety. The concept of "error" has been essential to the development of high reliability organizations (HROs). As practiced in HROs, error management has also been an important strategy for the management of uncertainty. "Uncertainty" has been conceived by some analysts as a condition that can convey little or no reliable information about its own boundary conditions or its specific threat to the operation of complex systems. The argument here is that uncertainty is differentiated and specified in HROs and provides important information in relation to error. Uncertainty does not, in the special context of HROs, end the possibility and practice of reliable management. In fact, error in HROs can be a starting point for the further analysis of ways in which uncertainty itself can be managed reliably. But the argument offered here does not mean that uncertainty does not challenge reliability in other settings. The COVID‐19 pandemic is offered as an example of how uncertainties may invalidate even the application of "reliability" as a performance standard in certain domains of management and policy.

This essay examines a peculiar problem in organization theory – its failure to achieve useful research‐based prescriptions for organizational design and practice in the face of challenges posed by new technology and evolving social problems. It is argued that an important part of this problem in organization theory is the under‐specification of its major concepts. Three under‐specified concepts in particular are examined – complexity, interdependence and scale. The analysis of these concepts is undertaken in the context of Todd LaPorte's work to promote, through well‐posed questions, clearer and more specific formulations of these and other concepts as independent variables in organizational analysis. The essay concludes with suggestions for continuing the specification of major concepts in organization theory in ways inspired by LaPorte.

Organizational research has shown many cases where organizational 'heroes'are honoured, and heroic tales are used not only in the process of building organizational reliability and performance, but for clarifying organizational values and culture and transmitting them from one generation to the next. Some high‐reliability organizations studied also display these properties; yet, there are some that are actively 'anti‐heroic,'disparaging individual exploits. An inquiry into the role of heroes and heroics in organizations leads to a typology by which hero‐avoiding and hero‐seeking organizations can be characterized and shows that both types are adaptations to their particular technical and functional environments. A great deal more remains to be learned about the dynamics of organizations seeking and maintaining reliability in very demanding circumstances before we can fully understand how the balance between holistic control and heroics might be chosen.

A critical problem facing modern organizations in a variety of settings is the erosion of slack. Given narrowing performance margins allowed many organizations, managers are tempted to "lock in" organizational performance through elaborated rules and procedures, formal authority assignments, and clearly differentiated job responsibilities. A case study of one organization seeking very high reliability in its performance—a nuclear power plant—is offered to demonstrate a contrary point of view. Reliability, it is argued, can best be achieved not through attempts at organizational invariance but through the management of fluctuations in important organizational relationships and practices. This strategy enhances reliability while preserving the protective functions of organizational slack.

This article examines the stability of rational decision making in complex, tightly coupled administrative organizations. In particular, it analyzes a process of decisional "tunneling" in which members of a set of decisions progressively undermine the rationality of one another, degrading organizational means-ends calculations. Under these circumstances, the pursuit of even boundedly rational decision making is displaced by "pathology"—behavior that is logically self-defeating, both organizationally and in relation to the self-interest of individual participants. The implications of this phenomenon are analyzed, both for organization theory and for exercises in organizational design.