A key difference is that people have been sailing for thousands of years and tunneling for hundreds. We've been developing software for decades now and are lear

A key difference is that people have been sailing for thousands of years and tunneling for hundreds. We've been developing software for decades now and are learning how to do it much more quickly than we're learning new ways of sailing or tunneling. In that regard, it's a creative process and more akin to writing a book than the examples you mention. Sure, risk assessment and management are all well and good - when they're practiced, but when it comes to doing something new (i.e. not writing a simple CRUD app in the software world), seeing it as a mechanical process is what leads to these tensions.