Managing complex situations under uncertainty: flexibility or rule compliance? Evidence from the eighteenth-century naval battles of Chesapeake and Saintes

ABSTRACT The objective of this study is to identify a resilient mode of management for a leader driving a system composed of different units (e.g., a fighting system) in a context where the complexity of a situation, time pressure, uncertainty, and the risk of irreversible errors constrain the possibilities of action. From a theoretical framework on reliability – the Highly Reliable Organization (HRO) and the Sensemaking approaches, which are close to each other but diverge in compliance with rules in degraded situations – we seek to analyze the factors supporting the reliability of different systems. To drive this analysis, we studied the behavior of leaders during two naval battles between the French and British fleets in the 18th century. The results, derived from the analysis of the logbooks, underline that a flexible approach – through procedural improvisation – is more relevant than compliance with rules in this specific context. From a theoretical point of view, the results provide a hierarchy of sources of reliability developed by the Sensemaking approach. Our findings also highlight that dynamic coupling (coupling/decoupling) can be a resilient management mode for systems composed of several units.