Kathleen Sutcliffe

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Summary

Kathleen M. Sutcliffe is a Bloomberg Distinguished Professor with appointments at Johns Hopkins University’s Carey Business School, School of Medicine (Anesthesia and Critical Care Medicine), School of Nursing, Bloomberg School of Public Health, and Armstrong Institute for Patient Safety and Quality. Her research examines the dynamics of high-performing organizations. It consists of two broad streams. The first explores organizational reliability, safety, and resilience, as well as the contributing factors of each and their underlying theoretical mechanisms. Sutcliffe seeks to understand how an organization’s design affects its members’ abilities to sense, cope with, learn from, and respond to unexpected events and uncertainty or ambiguity. The second stream of her research investigates top executive teams and their organizational processes, including sensemaking, decision-making, and learning.

Description of Research Impact

A prominent part of Sutcliffe’s research over the last decade has examined how the members of organizations sense and respond to unexpected and changing demands—demands that, if ignored, have the potential to result in small errors that are capable of escalating. 

Through her work, Sutcliffe has brought about positive changes, particularly in healthcare. Her research is historically grounded in practice, which began with her early professional work in health and social service programs in the state of Alaska. Sutcliffe’s appointments at Johns Hopkins University’s School of Medicine, School of Nursing, and Armstrong Institute for Patient Safety and Quality put her in direct contact with healthcare practitioners and provide access to healthcare organizations, where she is able to investigate important questions.

Sutcliffe’s research methods include a combination of traditional quantitative methodologies (survey and archival methods), quasi-experimental methodologies, and qualitative methodologies. Her scholarship has produced insights that resonate with practitioners. In particular, it has positioned her as a thought leader on how healthcare organizations can improve patient safety through better organizational design.

While Sutcliffe’s impact on business and society may be most visible in the healthcare domain, this is only one example of a high-risk dynamic system in which organizational reliability, resilience, and safety intersect. Sutcliffe’s studies have also contributed to best practices in other organizations that operate in complex, high-risk environments, such as aviation and nuclear power companies.

Examples of Research Impact

Sutcliffe’s book, Still Not Safe: Patient Safety and the Middle-Managing of American Medicine, co-authored with physician Robert L. Wears and published in 2020 by Oxford University Press, is a testament to her thought leadership in the domain of patient safety. The book draws together three streams of research on medical harm: traditional epidemiological research documenting the prevalence of medical injury or error, a mix of social science research (psychology, human factors, engineering, sociology, and organizational theory or behavior) concerning safety in high-risk activities, and dramatic narrative stories of patient harm primarily sourced from popular media. The book offers a constructive critique of the patient safety movement. In a related Time magazine article, Sutcliffe laid out the ideas that animate the book, concerning how the healthcare industry might attain the full promise of the patient safety movement.

A recent indication of Sutcliffe’s impact in the realm of high-hazard organizations comes from her work with the U.S. National Academy of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine (NASEM). In 2021, Sutcliffe was appointed by the NASEM Transportation Research Board to a committee on Emerging Trends in Aviation Safety. The committee recently released its first-year findings in a book titled Emerging Hazards in Commercial Aviation—Report 1: Initial Assessment of Safety Data and Analysis Processes.

Sutcliffe continues to produce important and timely research on organizational resilience. For example, one of her recent journal articles, covered in great detail by Business News Daily, draws lessons from the high-stress and low-information setting of adventure racing to investigate organizational resilience.

Select Publications

• Robert Wears and Kathleen Sutcliffe, Still Not Safe: Patient Safety and the Middle-Managing of American Medicine (New York: Oxford University Press, 2020).
• Kathleen Sutcliffe, “The Health Care Industry Needs to Be More Honest About Medical Errors,” Time, November 5, 2019, https://time.com/5717545/medical-errors/.

Supporting Links

• “Stay Positive! Resilient and Adaptable Teams Are Key to Business Success,” Business News Daily
• Emerging Hazards in Commercial Aviation—Report 1: Initial Assessment of Safety Data and Analysis Processes, National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine