Cultivating high-reliable organizing: A holistic perspective

High-reliable organizing (HRO) has long been associated with how organizations sustain reliable performance under conditions of complexity, uncertainty, and change. While Mindful Organizing (MO), and Resilience Engineering (RE) have generated important theoretical insights, guidance on how organizations can cultivate HRO in everyday organizing remains fragmented. This conceptual essay develops a holistic perspective that positions HRO as an ongoing accomplishment rather than a fixed organizational capability or the outcome of implementing isolated concepts. Through a systematic comparison of the five established MO processes and the four resilience potentials, we show how the two perspectives can be related while preserving their distinct analytical orientations. MO focuses on the collective organizing through which people notice, interpret, coordinate, and respond to emerging situations, while RE emphasizes organizational potentials to monitor, respond, anticipate, and learn under changing conditions. Building on this synthesis, we develop the holistic framework of HRO, identify two additional organizing processes— preoccupation with things that go right and self-awareness —and develop an approach to cultivating and operationalizing HRO through collaborative inquiry, driving forces, and situated practices. Rather than prescribing predefined practices, we argue that organizations can cultivate mindsets and directions of attention that guide how established concepts are translated to context-sensitive action while remaining grounded in the scientific foundations of HRO, MO, and RE. The essay contributes a theoretically grounded perspective for understanding and cultivating high-reliable organizing as an ongoing accomplishment in complex sociotechnical systems.