Sea gypsies’ knowledge saves village
By the time killer waves crashed over southern Thailand last Sunday the entire 181 population of their fishing village had fled to a temple in the mountains of South Surin Island, English language Thai daily The Nation reported.
"The elders told us that if the water recedes fast it will reappear in the same quantity in which it disappeared," 65-year-old village chief Sarmao Kathalay told the paper.
So while in some places along the southern coast, Thais headed to the beach when the sea drained out of beaches -- the first sign of the impending tsunami -- to pick up fish left flapping on the sand, the gypsies headed for the hills.
What's really interesting about this story is not that the sea gypsies had a wise saying about impending tsunamis but the fact that they managed to act on it as well. Tsunamis of this scale are quite rare. The seas don't recede everyday. So how did this group of people decide that they have to move to the hills after witnessing a rare phenomenon? My guess is that these sea gypsies are obsessed with disaster. They revere the sea and respect its power. They picture and play out possible disasters everyday of their life.
In their book, Managing the Unexpected, Karl Weick and Kathleen Sutcliffe analyze several sea gypsy-type behaviors in the corporate world. They call these organizations high-reliability organizations or HROs.
"Research reveals that certain organizations have been highly successful in honing their abilities to act reliably and handle adversity. These are called high-reliability organizations (HROs). They include aircraft carriers, nuclear power plants and firefighting crews, which consistently deliver high performance in unpredictable situations where the potential for error and disaster is overwhelming."
According to Weick and Sutcliffe, HROs have a kind of "mindfulness" about them that helps them to be wary and act on unexpected events. One characteristic feature of this mindfulness (they list 5 characteristics in their book), they reckon, is the HRO's preoccupation with failure. So even if nothing is going wrong in these organizations, they are obsessed with forming worst-case scenarios on the slightest indication of some weak failure signals. It is this constant playing out of worst-case scenarios that prepares people in these HROs to act on events that are rare or non-routine -- they learn to manage the unexpected. So, in some way, the sea gypsies are a high-reliability group.
Permalink | Friday, January 07, 2005
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