Professor Emeritus Kathleen Sutcliffe leads the way in uncertain times

Leading by example is a foundational principle of many leadership and management frameworks. When it comes to understanding how high-stakes organizations cope with uncertainty and build resiliency, there are few better examples than Professor Emeritus Kathleen Sutcliffe. Sutcliffe is a pioneer in the field of management and organization, particularly in the complex and dynamic health care industry. Her research helped define the field of managing the unexpected, and many of her colleagues and peers chose the first annual Managing the Unexpected Conference at the Johns Hopkins Carey Business School as an opportunity to celebrate her remarkable career.

“Kathie was so instrumental in really building out this area of research around managing the unexpected. She really has put Carey on the map as a place that would be known for studying those topics,” said Christopher Myers, the Peetz Family Professor of Leadership at Johns Hopkins Carey Business School. “She acted as the beacon that brought many of us who studied this to be on the faculty at Carey,” added Myers, who studied with Sutcliffe at the University of Michigan and co-directs Carey’s Center for Innovative Leadership, which organized the Managing the Unexpected Conference.

Sutcliffe’s body of research explores "high reliability organizations" that regularly avoid catastrophes in complex, high-risk environments, such as health care systems, aviation, fire and rescue, and nuclear power plants. Her work examines reliability, safety, resilience, and an organization’s ability to deal with unexpected events and uncertainty, as well as how top executive teams interact in organizational processes like sense-making, decision-making, and learning. According to Sutcliffe, a context of trust and respect helps people understand the larger goals of the system, recognize the small factors that might lead to failure, and establish flexible decision-making structures. Her books, review articles, empirical papers, and measurement tools on the subject have been cited more than 66,000 times in management, medical, nursing, and safety literature.

Keynote speaker Rangaraj Ramanujam, the Richard and Betty Ruth Miller Chair and Professor of Management at Vanderbilt’s Owen Graduate School of Management, noted how Sutcliffe’s research is more relevant than ever in an era of pandemics, political polarization, and disruptive technological advancement.

“Kathie has been such a big influence in my career in ways that I didn't fully realize until after I accepted the invitation to be keynote speaker,” Ramanujam said.

According to Ramanujam, Sutcliffe’s work moved the concept of managing the unexpected from the anomaly to the mainstream. “The fact that I'm not going to spend any time telling you that managing the unexpected is important tells you that it's really become mainstream. For someone who started off with a very different worldview, that's headline news.”

Tim Vogus, the Brownlee O. Currey, Jr. Professor of Management at Vanderbilt University, agreed that Sutcliffe’s work revolutionized the organizational science field.

“Kathie has been the most significant person in the entirety of my professional life, and there is not a close second,” said Vogus, who was Sutcliffe's very first doctoral student during her tenure at University of Michigan. “She has changed so many conversations on patient safety, safety culture, mindfulness, organizational learning, and high reliability. Like she's taken those in a completely new direction. I'm always thinking about, well, would Kathie buy what I'm doing? If I can answer that question with the affirmative, I know I've got a darn good paper.”

Sutcliffe, who retired in 2024, joined Johns Hopkins University as Carey Business School’s first Bloomberg Distinguished Professor in 2014. As a Bloomberg Distinguished Professor, she also held appointments at the Johns Hopkins University’s School of Medicine, School of Nursing, Bloomberg School of Public Health, and Armstrong Institute for Patient Safety and Quality.

“The unexpected is no longer occasional, it's endemic,” Sutcliffe said. “One of the beauties that I have always thought exists in thinking about managing the unexpected is that you can fit just about any research you want in that domain. This stuff is just so interesting.”