Agile Innovation

Executive Dialogue

Reimagining the High-Reliability Organization in the Age of AI

While the COVID-19 pandemic highlighted the importance of key principles of high-reliability organizations, including teamwork and communication, transparency and identifying bright spots and scaling them, health care providers also faced novel situations in which they couldn’t rely on previous experiences and protocols. Simply applying rules didn’t work. An iterative or test-and-learn management approach helped providers navigate the unknown — introducing something new into the system, seeing the response and then changing. Hospital leaders participating in a virtual executive dialogue examined how to reconcile the cultural shift between incremental change and the need for high reliability with the need for adopting new ways of operating with artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) as partners to individualize the patient experience.