Learning to manage the unexpected: applying Weick and Sutcliffe’s HRO principles to oil tanker accidents

PurposeWeick and Sutcliffe identified five principles that enable high-reliability organizations (HROs) to address environmental complexity and manage unexpected events. The current study aims to adopt this sensemaking perspective to analyze accidents within a typical HRO sector, namely maritime transport.Design/methodology/approachThrough a retrospective case study analysis, this study focused on seven oil tanker accidents, using them as illustrative examples.FindingsFindings show how the five principles contributed to the accidents' occurrence, explaining how failures in sensemaking affected the crew's capability to both prevent errors and cope with their consequences, thus leading to disasters.Research limitations/implicationsOverall, the study offers an applicative contribution showing how this model may provide a reliable framework for analyzing the psychosocial factors affecting an accident. This approach deepens the understanding of how latent factors are enacted and how the prevention and error management phases interrelate within a comprehensive flow of the entire accident sequence. Furthermore, the study emphasizes consistent patterns that emerge across multiple accidents within the same sector, in order to learn valuable lessons to improve safety measures in the future.Originality/valueThis study constitutes an exemplary application in support of how Weick and Sutcliffe's model is valuable for investigating HROs. It offers a second-order interpretative framework to understand accidents and underscores the interplay among these factors during the dynamic development of an accident.