Interviews by Canada’s Trade Commissioner Service: HRO Council Bringing Talent Across Borders
Improving Cooperation — and Human Nature — with High Reliability Research
Interviews between 2021–01–26 and 2021–07–07
https://www.tradecommissioner.gc.ca/canadexport/0006102.aspx?lang=eng
(Published 2021–07–08 in edited form. This is the full text of the interview originally sent for review by TCS. Photo by Josh Lavallee on Unsplash)
The Story
The High Reliability Organization Council (HROC) is a registered not-for-profit organization founded in the United States that has opened a new office in Canada now as well. Its team has pioneered research, development, and implementation in load balancing all the way back to the start of the World Wide Web in the ’90s (load balancing servers on the Internet), to its current frameworks that harness load balancing of data and tasks to improve human performance as firms strive to reach high reliability organization (HRO) status. And it has a proven track record, such as helping a Military installation’s medical unit reduce preventable deaths by 87%.
HROC’s research expertise centers around task saturation, which is basically too much to do in too little time, with tasks failing as a result, Then it designs processes to balance workloads that minimize task over/under load to, in turn, improve the reliability of organizations.
They have shown in their research at Wright Patterson Air Force Base in Dayton, Ohio (the home of the Military’s Human Performance Wing and, according to the World Health Organization, where the first safety checklist was developed in 1935), that when people have enough cognitive bandwidth, they can be more effective in preventing significant errors, and also more efficient with scarce resources while preventing those mistakes.
Specifically, HROC’s “Cooperative HRO” framework seeks to reduce catastrophic errors by expertly designing checklists and procedures, and also configuring and activating teams, to ensure they are built to proactively prevent overload. And its new research in Canada intends to increase checklist reliability by enabling people to be both “willing and able” to follow each step, something that in the past was taken for granted, but that the pandemic exposed as a major challenge in reducing preventable deaths worldwide.
It is now partnering with Canadian organizations that have the same safety and efficiency goals, looking to help both Canada and the United States, and is being aided in their international collaboration through the Canadian-United States-Mexico Agreement (CUSMA).
How can they help? First of all, there’s influencing policymakers with discoveries, evidence, and peer reviewed publications, then creating solutions to the underlying problems discovered. For example, HROC’s reducing of preventable deaths so drastically led to their work with the Air Force becoming a cover story article of a journal and being submitted to the United States Congress, which resulted in commendations on how their research went far above and beyond expectations, leading to a policy change on incorporating task saturation into the Military Health System’s HRO policy framework. Their project’s invention to address task saturation achieved the 2013 Military Health System Innovation Award.
HROC and its Canadian partners are now planning using their models to improve reliability in a whole host of organizations beyond Healthcare and Defense, with a plan to protect critical infrastructure and public safety, as well as to help workplaces increase workforce reliability and productivity, in addition to protecting their customers.
A key reason for expanding its sights is that in the past 5 years, their research took on a much broader scope. Motivated by a changing political climate in the U.S., and a deteriorating environment for truth, evidence, and scientific study in many parts of the world — all of which was debilitating public safety in a variety of areas — HROC identified the importance of tackling misinformation and disinformation. Its researchers had decades of experience in overcoming misinformation, since healthcare needs to make decisions quickly with incomplete data, which can often lead to wrong conclusions by stakeholders.
But they were also seeing how inaccurate data was being “weaponized” into disinformation, such as with vaccines and elections, to undermine public safety, or the cooperation necessary for innovation or for even democracy itself.
Terry Rajasenan, chief scientist for HROC, says, “Having the best and proven safety checklists and protocols don’t matter if they are not used, unfortunately. People must be both willing and able to do the steps necessary. Willingness to abide by rules is in short supply these days, whether it’s for doing what’s scientifically sound for public safety, or to uphold the U.S. Constitution and save democracy.”
He elaborates, “For example, according to a Pew Research survey, a fair judiciary — essentially a just application of the rule of law — is considered one of the most popular features of democracy by citizens of the U.S. and Canada. But a world of disinformation is a world without justice or security. People fall prey to false accusations of wrongdoing, or to ignored investigations and punishments for actual wrongdoing. Thus, the concept of innocence and guilt — and therefore justice — goes out the window, in effect becoming based on bad faith or simply whims.”
Their work was directly relevant to these issues, but they also began to see trends threatening the ability of assuring continuous research into politically sensitive topics, including pandemic safety measures and the disarming of disinformation, and sought to find havens and markets that would enable them to continue their research and operations unimpeded. To them, Winnipeg, Manitoba fit the bill perfectly.
Raising the stakes for their Canadian research, on what they term as “psychosocial barriers” to HRO, is the fact that High Reliability takes on a much broader, public safety perspective, such as what causes catastrophic failure on a leadership level, and why is it perpetrated by followers, contrary to scientific process and evidence based practices? “When viewed from the vantage point of public safety, the fact that members of society can behave against their own long-term interests, even when checklists and best practices that are given to the public have been shown to prevent catastrophic outcomes, significantly reduces the ability to achieve an HRO. And this consequently negates the value of any HRO initiative. Without good information, nobody can make good judgements and decisions. Simply put, disinformation and extreme beliefs prevent good decisions,” Rajasenan notes.
With many influencing factors, the High Reliability Organization Council determined Canada would serve as the optimal catalyst for reversing the trend toward disinformation and extremism they have seen in reducing measures of democracy around the world — and a place that would be safer from political interference in their research. Working with Economic Development Winnipeg, HROC opened an office in Winnipeg in 2020 to pursue these new research goals. CUSMA was an influencing factor, allowing the entire team access to working in the Canadian market, given their specialized knowledge — permitting them to bring their talent across borders, and soon hopefully bringing Canadian researchers to present to the Biden Administration their unique joint innovations with HROC as well. It is also enabling them to develop local clients and networks while performing their politically-sensitive research that, though seemingly in the public interest, goes against the prevailing winds of key politicians in the U.S.
One illustration is gun safety research, which had been banned for two decades from Federal research dollars. “So rather than focusing on the guns, we want to lower the temperature and thus the risks, since other nations have many guns, but we far and away exceed the rest of the Industrial Nations in mass shootings. And many of the mass shootings that have been occurring in the U.S. arise from grievances and resentments, which are being fueled by too many in the political arena. Changing these beliefs in the citizenry, we believe, is one key to reducing violence,” Rajasenan said.
Rajasenan has also highlighted the multiple benefits that free trade offers, noting, “Improving cooperation and reliability strengthens teams, economies, and democracies in our two partner nations, as well as eventually all their allies.”
HROC’s work is now split into two key areas, the first already capitalizing on CUSMA.
In the first bucket, they work directly with organizations to build capacities for reliability based on their award winning and highly effective organizational models. For instance, HROC is already in joint-venture partnering discussions with a company in Winnipeg focused on ventilation systems and interested in air quality to improve the cost-effectiveness in reducing the spread of Covid and other respiratory infections. The partner, Canadian-based data analytics firm ioAirFlow, is a team of specialists in commercial building health and efficiency performance. HROC is working with ioAirFlow to identify and together provide patent-protected solutions that reduce the risk of airborne respiratory infections in specific building types. The outcomes of this project will provide a replicable blueprint for building managers to mitigate their risk of on-site aerosol transmission of viruses, bacteria, and spores, and not only for the current pandemic and its variants, but also the next pandemic — and every year in between, given that respiratory infections in a normal year are the 3rd largest killer in Canada, and in 5th largest killer in the U.S.
The HROC and ioAirFlow teams will be crossing the border bi-directionally thanks to CUSMA, as they do both R&D on their joint offerings as well as visit sites for client assessments of risk and cost-benefit analyses. The second phase of their work if commissioned by clients includes expert training and possible technology implementation to sustain improvements.
HROC is working with ioAirFlow’s specialists in commercial building health and performance efficiency to identify and provide solutions that reduce the risk of airborne respiratory infections in specific building types. Rajasenan says the project will provide a blueprint for building managers to mitigate the risk of aerosol transmission of these infections, to create “infection-resistant” buildings.
He says that once the current travel restrictions are lifted, HROC and ioAirFlow teams will cross the border for research and training. HROC plans to set up a small office in a location closer to Pittsburgh, such as St. Catharines, while the Canadian headquarters remains in Winnipeg, beginning with a staff of two — Canadian resident Sid Vijayaraghavan, leading a project to prevent health workers globally from violence during the pandemic, and Canadian student Alex Pimentel, who developed TikTok videos on pandemic safety measures.
In the second bucket, HROC continues to perform research to challenge one of the most important issues of our time — ensuring social cohesion, and reversing the trend toward Behavioral Sink, where people become increasingly combative with each other and ultimately self-destruct, as being witnessed throughout the world. Crucially, HROC wants to ensure cooperation and civil society, and by doing so, in effect save democracy and the many benefits it affords people. Their Canadian office helps shield them from potential political interference that they could experience in the U.S. toward these important goals.
Thus, Canada serves as a safe harbour for HROC. Although their work is directly relevant to industry, it also challenges some of the key issues of our time as their operation in Winnipeg tackles pandemics, misinformation, and other threats.
But the propagation of disinformation and fake news figures to be the highest obstacle to hurdle For instance, HROC research has determined that constant exposure to data and conflict creates a dopamine feedback loop, and to a large extent this is as a result of social media, technology, and everything else pertinent to the information age. This consequently has led to a reduction in reasoning and critical thinking necessary for individuals and a society to solve problems and advance. Their models focused on High Reliability have been shown to overcome this challenge, enabling and encouraging rational decision making that navigates the capabilities and limitations of the cognitive bandwidth and delayed gratification of participants necessary to reach the pinnacle of human cognitive performance. And this work is key to their operations in Winnipeg.
Rajasenan believes disinformation is not only nefarious but also feeds addictions found in human nature that can quickly spiral out of control, as was seen in the U.S. Capitol Insurrection, saying, “The problem with evil is the more you feed it, the hungrier it gets, and that is what led to the many atrocities, such as purges and world wars, of the tyrannical demagogues of the 20th century.”
In short, HROC seeks to ensure team-level, national, and global cooperation — and they see Canada as the bridge where they can ensure they have the time and freedom to translate their research into something transformative, as Rajasenan concludes, “The goal should not be just to save people’s lives, but to also make them better people. This would be then what, ultimately, makes the world a better place.”
