An interview with Karlene Roberts

In this interview, Karlene Roberts, University of California, Berkeley, discusses her research on high reliability organizations (HROs). She defines HROs as organizations that can have catastrophic outcomes but which conduct relatively error free operations over long periods of time and make consistently good decisions that result in high quality and reliability operations. She then discusses major advancements and achievements in this research as well as its limitations and challenges. She talks about surprises the research group faced, progress in terms of organizations becoming more reliable, design principles for such organizations, the necessity for HROs, potential future research efforts and difficulties and obstacles in the research program. Finally, she addresses the issue of whether every organization should be a HRO.