The High Reliability Organisation (HRO) operating model, and the advantages it delivers to organisational risk management, is well understood by both academics and practitioners.

HROs tend to be large, market-dominating corporations, which devote significant resources to delivering safer operations. Such organisations also tend to share the same potential to cause significant harm to either large numbers of people, or the environment, if their safety systems fail.

Very little academic interest has been shown in looking at the many business sectors that are serviced almost exclusively by small firms. Part of the reason for this, is rarely do small firms represent the same level of threat to society as HROs. There are exceptions, however, and the built environment sector is one that is the subject of review here.

The 2017 Grenfell Tower Fire exposed a systemic failure throughout the UK built environment to observe even the most basic of safe operating practices. The implementation of many of the provisions of the Building Safety Act in October 2023, signals the commencement of the enforcement phase of the rectification process that will drive forward the adoption of safer construction standards in England.

But ... there is a problem. There are some 1.23 million workers (66%), employed by 96% of the construction firms in Great Britain (ONS Statistics, 2022), who arguably rarely undergo any form of enhanced training that may lead to improved building safety standards in the work they carry out. In isolation, a single small firm is unlikely to represent a risk of disaster to the society in which it operates. When circumstances serve to make the majority of all micro-sized firms to behave in the same way, however, one has the disaster incubation situation that led to the Grenfell Tower fire tragedy.

We argue that the homogeneous behavior of a dominate (96%) group of independent firms, such as the cohort in the UK construction sector, could be usefully viewed as a low reliability organisation (LR0). It would be the antithesis of a HRO. Predicting what such a cohort will not do, can be just as useful as knowing how a HRO might behave is certain circumstances.

It may be ambitious, but the purpose of this website is to promote practical solutions that will raise building safety standards in this LRO cohort.

LRO workers are often hard-working, semi-skilled workers, who typically did not engage with the academic style of learning during their schooling years. They learned their trade on the tools, often with the complete absence of ant commitment to formal CPD training after they left school or college education. The establishment had done nothing for them in their formative years. They are suspicious of authority and resistant to it assuming control over their working lives. That said, experience of working with these people has confirmed that because it is just as easy to do something the right way, as it is the wrong way, all one has to do is figure how to show them what is the correct way to do things.

That should be a simple solution to deliver, but the essential building safety knowledge that needs to be disseminated to this cohort is both institutionalized, and therefore monetarised. This creates a financial and qualification entry-barrier many cohort workers cannot overcome. Furthermore, the required knowledge is often delivered in an academic learning format that is an anathema to these cohort's workers.