by Sandy Ludington
March 23, 2026
You have lean practices. You implemented kaizen. You have Agile teams. You go to the gemba. But is your organization high-performing? Are your products highly reliable? Each of these management practices has its place, but choosing and implementing one of them doesn’t automatically make you a high-performing company. High performance in the face of change, effective response to problems, and consistent excellence require something more.
At the start of 2007 Nokia was the undisputed leader in cell phone technology. But the release of Apple’s iPhone and Google’s Android operating system shortly thereafter changed everything. Despite market-leading strength in hardware development, Nokia rapidly fell behind against this new competition. Even if their products were reliable and successful in the context for which they were designed, the organization was not adaptable in the face of change. Given the breadth and pace of change in cell phone technology in 2007, it’s impossible to guess how things might have gone differently if Nokia had made different decisions, but we know that they underappreciated the influence of app developers, failed to recognize the strength of consumer preference for touch screens, and were overly reliant on their existing market dominance. Here’s a good summary of Nokia’s strategic errors at the time, by Siddhartha Roy: The rise and fall of Nokia.
What if the Nokia culture had been more preoccupied with the potential for failure? Or if they had spent more time cultivating to the experience and expertise of app developers? Or if they had considered the merits of each operating system with more nuance, and less simplicity? Could they have reacted more nimbly and ridden the wave of innovation along with the rest of the industry? We may never know exactly, but improving in these respects would have given them a better chance. These ways of thinking are examples of what we (and many others) call High Reliability Principles.
There is a rich literature on High Reliability Principles and High Reliability Organizations (HROs) – concepts that argue success comes from culture, management systems, and leaders grounded to certain key ways of thinking – particularly in organizations which consistently operate in tough environments or with complex systems. Is the same true for product teams (like Nokia), innovating, challenging the status quo, testing new ideas, and succeeding through a series of failures (and corresponding lessons)? We think so.
At Novellum Partners we have found that high reliability organizations exist in every domain where decisions and actions have important consequences – whether those organizations are operating equipment, designing systems, or managing processes. In the same way that many large, well-respected organizations with operational missions have adopted and productionized high reliability principles in their daily operations, we believe that product development organizations and project teams can also adopt these principles – strengthening themselves and the products they create in doing so. High reliability products come from high reliability product organizations and effective project execution comes from high reliability project teams.
We translate the high reliability principles, lessons from many broad product experiences, and the wisdom of the systems engineering discipline into improved product and project organizations – so they can achieve the strongest performance possible and rapid progress toward success. Reach out and talk to us about how a workshop, a rapid capabilities assessment, or tailored project can improve your team’s performance and accelerate you toward your goals.