Karlene Roberts is a lecturer and full professor at Haas School of Business, UC Berkeley, a Research Psychologist at the Institute of Industrial Relations and is an Associate Director, at the Center for Catastrophic Risk Management. She has visiting appointments at: Graduate School of Management, University of California, Irvine and Hong Kong University of Science and Technology Current Research and Interests: The design and management of organizations and systems of organizations in which errors can have catastrophic consequences. The results of this research have been applied to U.S. Navy aircraft carrier operations, the U.S. Coast Guard, The Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunication (SWIFT), The Federal Aviation’s Air Traffic Control System, Gard Services, British Petroleum, NASA, and the medical industry. Currently working with incident management teams in the U.S. and France on an international project interested in improving reliability in the high risk environments of wildland fire.

Karl E. Weick is the Renis Likert Collegiate Professor of Organizational Behavior and Psychology and professor of psychology at the University of Michigan Business School. Dr. Weick's research interests include collective sensemaking under pressure, medical errors, handoffs in extreme events, high-reliability performance, improvisation and continuous change.

Kathleen M. Sutcliffe is a Professor of Management Organizations at the University of Michigan Business School. Dr. Sutcliffe's research is devoted to understanding the fundamental mechanisms of organizational adaptation, reliability, and resilience. Her work focuses on processes associated with team and organizational resilience, high-reliability organizing, and investigation of the social and organizational underpinnings of medical mishaps, with the explicit goal of understanding how an organization's design contributes to its member's ability to successfully manage unexpected events