Inspiring Trust

Church Communications & Organizational Vulnerability

Jordi Pujol Soler, Juan Narbona, José María Díaz

• Publisher: EDUSC
• Year: 2021
• eBook ISBN: 9788883339714
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Nonprofit Organizations & Charities
• Index: Business

Technology is furthering a swift and profound economic, social and cultural change: not only the digital economy and new information flows, but also personal habits and styles of life, even our relationships, are deeply shaped by technology. This ongoing new scenario poses some challenges to organizations that are called to be transparent and accountable, and to understand what to do in the digital ecosystem.As Pope Francis said, "what we are experiencing is not simply an epoch of changes, but an epochal change. We find ourselves living at a time when change is no longer linear, but epochal". Those words were pronounced just some months before the coronavirus pandemic, a global situation that worsened the weakening and increasing uncertainty of relationships brought about by the digital revolution. A new world was coming and old powers were losing control over it.The pandemic fostered societal fears. People didn't trust their leaders' capability to guide them or to take the right decisions. This lack of leadership put trust in institutions to the test, but that distrust was not something new. Statistics show that since the 90's, trust in some organizations that have been the backbone of society is plummeting. Cultural and social changes together with scandals and incoherence on the part of some groups led publics to evaluate organizations more rigorously than ever. A culture of suspicion toward political parties, financial institutions, trade unions, the media, and also – of course – the Church, has since then been the norm.

COMMUNICATING EFFECTIVELY IN HIGH-RISK ORGANIZATIONS:

LEARNING FROM HIGH RELIABILITY ORGANIZATIONS

Karen Sanders

St. Mary’s University, UK

Introduction

Even before the COVID-19 pandemic struck in 2020, our world could be characterized as volatile, uncertain, complex and ambiguous (or “VUCA”, an acronym used by US military to describe the state of the world after the end of the Cold War). Global trends have produced a highly dynamic operating environment for organizations, including rapid technical advancement in digital technology and the development of social media and big data. Organizations’ heavy reliance on digital infrastructure and the interdependencies it produces mean that they all now effectively inhabit a high-risk environment. This was dramatically illustrated by the catastrophic disruption of Ireland’s health system by a ransomware attack in May 2021 (Noonan 2021).

There is one type of organization which could be described as an expert at managing risk, namely a high reliability organization (HRO), characterized by a particular organizational culture which necessitates rich communication. In this chapter, I explain the organizing principles of HROs and what we can learn from them for effective organizational communication.

Risk, Black Swans and High Reliability Organizations

The 2020/21 pandemic has produced huge suffering around the world. At the time of writing, there are 167 million confirmed cases across 190 countries and 3.47 million people have died (Worldometer 2021). The pandemic has posed many challenges and asked many questions of governments, of citizens, of welfare and health systems and of international organizations such as the WHO (World Health Organization). It has been described by some as a black swan event. A black swan event is described by Taleb (2007) in his eponymous book as an unpredictable, catastrophic event. In fact, research by national governments and international organizations shows us that the pandemic was, sadly, an all too predictable event. Convened by the World Bank and WHO, the Global Preparedness Monitoring Board issued a report titled A World at Risk which concluded that: “Although national leaders respond to health crises when fear and panic grow strong enough, most countries do not devote the consistent energy and resources needed to keep outbreaks from escalating into disasters” (2019, 20). The UK’s most recently available National Risk Register (Cabinet Office 2017) also made clear that the pandemic was very much on the government’s radar. The horizontal axis in graphic 1 shows the likelihood of an event and on the vertical axis the probable severity of the event’s impact. The key below the graph reveals that in 2017 the British government considered that a pandemic, albeit an influenza pandemic, was very probable and would have the most severe impact on the country: it was given the highest risk rating on Britain’s risk register. Furthermore, in 2016, a rehearsal for an influenza pandemic had taken place and had shown major gaps in preparedness (Bryce et al., 2020).

Graphic 1: Matrix -Hazards, diseases, accidents, and societal risks

Source: Cabinet Office 2017 National Risk Register, p. 9

Several scholars and institutes have looked at how national governments dealt with the pandemic according to a series of indicators in terms of deaths per million population, numbers of infections, etc. In January 2021, an Australian think tank (Lowy Institute 2021) produced a report ranking countries according to those indicators to see how well, to date, governments had responded to COVID-19. New Zealand came out on top, as being the country which, thus far, has responded to the pandemic most effectively while, sadly, Brazil was rated at the bottom of the scale. While it is almost certainly premature to come to any hard and fast conclusions about government performance in the face of the pandemic, the think tank’s report provides a snapshot of how governments responded to risk and then managed the consequences. For many Western governments, the early indications are that serious mistakes were made and they could do well to look at the experience of high reliability organizations, the world experts in risk management.

High reliability organisations (or HROs) are organisations that “are able to manage and sustain almost error-free performance despite operating in hazardous conditions where the consequences of errors could be catastrophic” (Lekka 2011, i). A high reliability organization would be, for example, an aircraft carrier. Aircraft carriers do more than host airplanes, load weapons and maintain aircraft. They have to be replenished where the replenishment ship transfers to the carrier everything the carrier uses in daily operations. The two ships must travel in parallel at the same precise speed. If one gets too close to the other, they will crash into each other. If they move too far apart, the transfer lines will snap, destroying cargo and killing and injuring those in the way. Other examples of high reliability organizations are nuclear power stations and airline companies. They have been studied extensively because of their di...

Table of contents

• 00Presentation
• 01Narbona
• 02Gregory
• 03Sanders
• 04Mora
• 05Domingo
• 06Doyle
• 07Zollner
• 08Sturla
• 09Daniels
• 10Magalhaes
• 11Kelly
• 13Younger
• 14GonzalezAlorda
• 15Guillen
• 16Hoffman
• 17Ruffini