Drift into Failure

By: Sidney Dekker

Narrated by: Sidney Dekker

Length: 7 hrs and 49 mins

Publisher's summary

What does the collapse of sub-prime lending have in common with a broken jackscrew in an airliner’s tailplane? Or the oil spill disaster in the Gulf of Mexico with the burn-up of Space Shuttle Columbia? These were systems that drifted into failure. While pursuing success in a dynamic, complex environment with limited resources and multiple goal conflicts, a succession of small, everyday decisions eventually produced breakdowns on a massive scale.

We have trouble grasping the complexity and normality that gives rise to such large events. We hunt for broken parts, fixable properties, people we can hold accountable. Our analyses of complex system breakdowns remain depressingly linear, depressingly componential - imprisoned in the space of ideas once defined by Newton and Descartes.

The growth of complexity in society has outpaced our understanding of how complex systems work and fail. Our technologies have gotten ahead of our theories. We are able to build things - deep-sea oil rigs, jackscrews, collateralized debt obligations - whose properties we understand in isolation. But in competitive, regulated societies, their connections proliferate, their interactions and interdependencies multiply, their complexities mushroom.

This book explores complexity theory and systems thinking to understand better how complex systems drift into failure. It studies sensitive dependence on initial conditions, unruly technology, tipping points, diversity - and finds that failure emerges opportunistically, non-randomly, from the very webs of relationships that breed success and that are supposed to protect organizations from disaster. It develops a vocabulary that allows us to harness complexity and find new ways of managing drift.

©2012 Sidney Dekker (P)2018 Sidney Dekker

Critic reviews

"Dekker is a specialist in things going wrong. He is the world's leading thinker on airline safety. He is concerned about drift into failure in hospitals, on oil drilling platforms, in financial services, on NASA missions. But my hope that the book would somehow be about the human condition in a more intimate way was not disappointed." (Australian Library Review)

Repetitive and generally insightful

I started this book excited to learn about why complex systems fail. While there were some interesting and well-explained case studies (i.e. Alaska 261 crash), the arguments presented in this book are relentlessly repetitive such that the reader has no incentive to finish the book.

The author shrewdly develops arguments against what is framed as Newtonian-Cartesian approaches of reductionist, "down-and-in" thinking for understanding complex systems, but stops short of providing any actionable alternative. It would have been nice to see some specific recommendations of paths forward in the face of rejecting the basis of 300 years of analytical thinking.

wish I could exchange for another title

Not a good work. I agree with the 2011 review by D. R. Martz now that I have used the text myself.