Kathleen M. Sutcliffe is a Bloomberg Distinguished Professor with appointments in the Johns Hopkins Carey Business School, the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine in the Departments of Anesthesia and Critical Care Medicine, the Johns Hopkins School of Nursing, the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, and the Armstrong Institute for Patient Safety and Quality. Her research program has been devoted to investigating how organizations and their members cope with uncertainty and how organizations can be designed to be more reliable and resilient. She has investigated organizational safety, high reliability, and resilience practices in oil and gas exploration and production, chemical processing, steel production, wildland firefighting, and in healthcare. Her research has appeared widely in management and healthcare journals and she has co-authored seven books. She has presented her work across the world. She serves on the editorial boards of several journals and has served as a proposal reviewer for the National Academies of Science, Engineering, and Medicine. She has consulted with the leadership teams of numerous companies including Goldman Sachs, Georgia Pacific, Marathon Oil, and ThyssenKrupp.
Education
- PhD, Organization Theory and Organizational Behavior, University of Texas at Austin
- MN, University of Washington
- BS, University of Alaska
- BA, University of Michigan
Research
Selected publications
- Still Not Safe: Patient Safety and the Middle Managing of American Medicine (with R. Wears). 2020. New York: Oxford University Press.
- Managing the Unexpected: Sustainable Performance in a Complex World, Third Edition (with K. Weick). 2016. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass.
- Crossing Academic Boundaries for Diagnostic Safety: Challenges and Potential Solutions from Clinical Perspectives and High-Reliability Organizing Principles (with E. Yousef et al.). 2021. Human Factors.
- Organizational Science and Health Care (with A. Mayo & C. Myers). 2021. Academy of Management Annals.
- Covid-19 Has Made It Clear Why All Physicians Need to Know About the Business of Healthcare (with C. Myers et al.). 2021. Journal of Patient Safety and Risk Management.
- Introduction to the Special Issue ‘On the Way to Ithaka: Commemorating the 50th Anniversary of the Publication of Karl E. Weick’s The Social Psychology of Organizing' (with H. Tsoukas et al.). 2020.’ Journal of Management Studies.
- Gender Bias in Collaborative Medical Decision Making: Emergent Evidence (with E. Helzer et al.). 2020. Academic Medicine.
- Resilience in Action: Leading for Resilience in Response to Covid-19 (with M. Barton et al.). 2020. BMJ Leader.
- Past Chair of the Academy of Management Division of Managerial and Organizational Cognition.
- Editorial boards, Academy of Management Journal, Organization Science, Organization Studies
Teaching
Current
- Power and Politics in Organizations
- Leading Change
Honors and distinctions
- Elected Fellow of the International Academy of Quality and Safety in Health Care, 2020
- McCombs School of Business Distinguished PhD Alumnus Award, 208
- Elected Fellow of the Academy of Management, 2018
- Awarded Rockefeller Foundation Bellagio Residency Fellowship July-August, 2016
- Awarded the MOC Distinguished Scholar Award by the Managerial and Organizational Cognition Division of the Academy of Management, 2015
In the media
- "A Critical History of America's Failed Push for Patient Safety," The Hub
- "The Health Care Industry Needs to Be More Honest About Medical Errors," Op-ed, Time Magazine, online Nov. 5, 2019 and print Nov. 21, 2019