Resilience and High Performance in the Age of Uncertainty

The unexpected has become a growing part of our everyday lives. Terrorist attempts, environmental catastrophes, and a wildly shifting economy and financial instability have become a regular part of our day-to-day existence. Professor Kathleen Sutcliffe has dedicated her research for the last decade to understanding how organizations and their members cope with uncertainty and unexpected events. Before completing her doctoral degree, Dr. Sutcliffe lived and worked in urban and rural Alaska, where her jobs included: working as a laborer on the Alaska pipeline, as a deckhand on a crab fishing boat in the Bering Sea and as health nurse practitioner in a rural Alaskan Community.

Now, as a professor of Management and Organizations at the University of Michigan, Dr. Sutcliffe is particularly interested in learning how complex organizations can be designed to be more reliable and resilient, and she is learning that from the best, those that deal with uncertainty every day.

Listen in as executive coach, Lisa Pasbjerg, interviews her about her current work investigating these issues in the real-world work life situations of wild land firefighting and healthcare, and, about the important "take home" messages are that we all need to learn.