KARL E. WEICK is the Rensis Likert Distinguished University Professor Emeritus of Organizational Behavior and Psychology at the University of Michigan. Weick received the Irwin Award and Best Article of the Year award from the Academy of Management. Fast Company's Senior Editor Keith Hammonds calls Weick "the smartest business thinker that you've never heard of."

KATHLEEN M. SUTCLIFFE is a Bloomberg Distinguished Professor of Business and Medicine at Johns Hopkins University and the Gilbert and Ruth Whitaker Professor Emerita of Business Administration at the Ross School of Business, University of Michigan. She was named Researcher of the year and has served on a National Academy of Science panel to assess the resilience of the Department of Homeland Security.

All organizations are challenged by the unexpected natural disasters, civil unrest, international conflict, extreme economic fluctuations, and other unforeseen crises that affect their ability to function. Why are some organizations better able to endure and adapt when faced with unanticipated obstacles? Understanding how to maintain function when catastrophe strikes is key to keeping any organization viable.

In this thoroughly revised and updated third edition of Managing the Unexpected, Karl E. Weick and Kathleen M. Sutcliffe explore their groundbreaking ideas in light of the unique challenges organizations have been faced with in recent years including bank failures, intelligence failures, quality failures, and other organizational breakdowns, which are often self-inflicted. This vital resource clearly demonstrates why some organizations have the capacity to sustain high performance in the face of unforeseen change. High reliability organizations (HROs) such as commercial aviation, emergency rooms, aircraft carrier flight operations, and firefighting units are looked to as models of exceptional organizational preparedness. Managing the Unexpected explains how these HROs developed ways of acting and styles of learning that enable them to manage the unexpected better than other organizations.

This updated edition explores the essential elements of high reliability organizing in a variety of settings including banking, museum curating, latent fingerprint identification, aircraft piloting, and automobile manufacturing, and puts the emphasis on the foundational qualities and principles that define HROs. Expanding on the first two editions of their classic work, Weick and Sutcliffe offer an in-depth discussion of the complexity of five basic principles failure, simplification, operations, resilience, and expertise. As they explain, considerable commitment and competence are necessary, both to deploy these essential principles in the face of the unexpected and to organize around them in order to sustain performance. The revised third edition also contains a broader range of cases that demonstrate how mindful organizing can be directed to enhance sustained reliable performance.

The third edition of Managing the Unexpected is a guide for exploring the various kinds of unexpected events that can unsettle any organization and includes a template that can bolster an organization's ability to anticipate and remain resilient when managing unexpected disruptions.