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As much as I appreciate the sentiment and I never like to miss a chance to pile on PowerPoint, this is really, really missing the point.

As the CAIB report makes clear, the PowerPoint slide was a small symptom of the actual problem of a complex organization gradually accepting more and more risk as “in family” simply because unexplained phenomena hadn’t caused serious issues before (while remaining unexplained). The CAIB report really is a masterpiece (as is Feynman’s appendix to the Challenger report) of understanding how the understanding of risk can be subjugated to organizational pressures over time.



> The CAIB report really is a masterpiece (as is Feynman’s appendix to the Challenger report) of understanding how the understanding of risk can be subjugated to organizational pressures over time.

Agreed. It is a useful document to read for anyone who plans meetings and heavily relies on consensus to see where the problems lay. You need outsiders and first principles thinkers (physicists are good options, as Feynman always demonstrates) to disrupt bureaucratic agreement.


Yeah, I think this is right. Which doesn't detract from the slide being terrible, but just adds a bit more about why the slide was terrible.

Edit: from the summary of chapter 7 of the CAIB report [1]:

"organizational barriers which prevented effective communication of critical safety information and stifled professional differences of opinion;"

http://s3.amazonaws.com/akamai.netstorage/anon.nasa-global/C...




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