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While Allan McDonald was obviously right, for one case where it was justified, how many other instances there are where an engineer/scientist expressed concerns

by GuB-42 6y ago

While Allan McDonald was obviously right, for one case where it was justified, how many other instances there are where an engineer/scientist expressed concerns, was ignored, and everything went fine. I'd say that as a rule, a good engineer will always be concerned. With his knowledge and experience, he will know everything that can go wrong. And asking him to make life-and-death decisions must be really hard when you know that your contraption can always be made safer, given enough time you don't have. How many big milestones were made possible because some clueless executive decided to risk the life of people? How to make the difference, without the benefit of hindsight, between an overly cautious engineer and a savior?

jacquesm 6y ago
You have not understood the main lesson from the Challenger accident: the fact that everything went fine is not proof that everything is fine. That's exactly what normalization of deviance is all about. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Normalization_of_deviance https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Normalization_of_deviance
jiofih 6y ago
I think you’re being very, very generous in your interpretation of roles. You don’t just risk “innovating” when human lives are at stake, and in this case the danger was very well known: the engineers knew exactly what, and how, it could fail, due to the temperature being way out of spec. Launching under freezing weather was no particular achievement. They could have delayed the launch for better weather with no loss of “big milestones”.
- GuB-42 6y ago
  You do risk innovating when human lives are at stake, we wouldn't have a moon landing otherwise. And I never said engineers concerns were unfounded, quite the opposite in fact, engineers know what can go wrong. If your engineers don't say "no", either they are incompetent or they are heartless. And because Allan McDonald was a great engineer and human being, he said "no". My point was more general than the Challenger disaster. When to listen to engineers and when to take unreasonable risks? Here, the answer is obvious, and we know that in general, Allan McDonald was someone to listen to but we have hindsight. How do we make the difference between chances you can't take and over-caution that can drag project forever? It would be interesting to know how risk was calculated in the space shuttle program since we have problems going both ways: two catastrophic accidents, and runaway costs which are, for a large parts, safety-related in response to these accidents.
  - jiofih 6y ago
    You went right over the main point - there was nothing “innovative” in risking a launch under bad weather. The exact same launch would happen later. Any rationalization of “somebody has to take the risks the wimpy engineers won’t” is pure bad manager romanticizing.

by GuB-42 6y ago

jacquesm 6y ago

You have not understood the main lesson from the Challenger accident: the fact that everything went fine is not proof that everything is fine. That's exactly what normalization of deviance is all about. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Normalization_of_deviance https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Normalization_of_deviance

jiofih 6y ago

I think you’re being very, very generous in your interpretation of roles. You don’t just risk “innovating” when human lives are at stake, and in this case the danger was very well known: the engineers knew exactly what, and how, it could fail, due to the temperature being way out of spec. Launching under freezing weather was no particular achievement. They could have delayed the launch for better weather with no loss of “big milestones”.

GuB-42 6y ago
You do risk innovating when human lives are at stake, we wouldn't have a moon landing otherwise. And I never said engineers concerns were unfounded, quite the opposite in fact, engineers know what can go wrong. If your engineers don't say "no", either they are incompetent or they are heartless. And because Allan McDonald was a great engineer and human being, he said "no". My point was more general than the Challenger disaster. When to listen to engineers and when to take unreasonable risks? Here, the answer is obvious, and we know that in general, Allan McDonald was someone to listen to but we have hindsight. How do we make the difference between chances you can't take and over-caution that can drag project forever? It would be interesting to know how risk was calculated in the space shuttle program since we have problems going both ways: two catastrophic accidents, and runaway costs which are, for a large parts, safety-related in response to these accidents.
- jiofih 6y ago
  You went right over the main point - there was nothing “innovative” in risking a launch under bad weather. The exact same launch would happen later. Any rationalization of “somebody has to take the risks the wimpy engineers won’t” is pure bad manager romanticizing.