Informal organizational networking as a crisis- avoidance strategy: US naval flight operations as a case study

The requirement for maintaining responsiveness and flexibility with a high degree of operational reliability and safety puts considerable demand on any organization. In the case of US Navy flight operations at sea, conditions of extraordinarily tight coupling and high technical complexity, flexible demand and uncertain environment provide more potential sources of crisis and acci dent than there are management personnel or permanent structures to cope with them. This paper discusses the Navy's evolved and relatively successful strategy of creating and maintaining a set of informal, evanescent, functional networks whose primary purpose is to anticipate and deflect emerging crises rather than merely react to them.