Storytelling, Mindfulness and High-Reliability Organizing

Abstract

How is a conventionally structured bureaucratic public-sector organization that is highly standardized, hierarchical, formalized, and specialised in its operations, nevertheless sufficiently mindful to achieve high reliability? Our answer is that mindfulness is in part, constituted discursively in the form of streams of stories told by organizational members associated with officially sanctioned organizing frames. Based on an in-depth analysis of the Environment Agency (EA), the mission of which is to protect and improve the environment in England, we show how heedful interrelating occurred through shared discursive frames which martialled communal stories, and how these frames and stories sensitized people to their environment, prompted them continuously to question assumptions, synthesized consonant sensemaking, and facilitated coordinated collective action. The EA, we argue, is a ‘reliability seeking’ organization, which, in common with other institutions that need effectively to cope with the demands of complex, ambiguous, dynamic environments while engaged in time-critical tasks, needed mindfully to operate to minimize error. Storytelling, we argue, is mindfulness in action.