Books on Failure

Failure in General

To Forgive Design: Understanding Failure

Henry Petroski

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When planes crash, bridges collapse, and automobile gas tanks explode, we are quick to blame poor design. But Henry Petroski says we must look beyond design for causes and corrections. Known for his masterly explanations of engineering successes and failures, Petroski here takes his analysis a step further, to consider the larger context in which accidents occur.

In To Forgive Design he surveys some of the most infamous failures of our time, from the 2007 Minneapolis bridge collapse and the toppling of a massive Shanghai apartment building in 2009 to Boston’s prolonged Big Dig and the 2010 Gulf oil spill. These avoidable disasters reveal the interdependency of people and machines within systems whose complex behavior was undreamt of by their designers, until it was too late. Petroski shows that even the simplest technology is embedded in cultural and socioeconomic constraints, complications, and contradictions.

Failure to imagine the possibility of failure is the most profound mistake engineers can make. Software developers realized this early on and looked outside their young field, to structural engineering, as they sought a historical perspective to help them identify their own potential mistakes. By explaining the interconnectedness of technology and culture and the dangers that can emerge from complexity, Petroski demonstrates that we would all do well to follow their lead.

The Logic Of Failure: Recognizing And Avoiding Error In Complex Situations

Dietrich Dorner link

Why do we make mistakes? Are there certain errors common to failure, whether in a complex enterprise or daily life? In this truly indispensable book, Dietrich Dörner identifies what he calls the “logic of failure”—certain tendencies in our patterns of thought that, while appropriate to an older, simpler world, prove disastrous for the complex world we live in now. Working with imaginative and often hilarious computer simulations, he analyzes the roots of catastrophe, showing city planners in the very act of creating gridlock and disaster, or public health authorities setting the scene for starvation. The Logic of Failure is a compass for intelligent planning and decision-making that can sharpen the skills of managers, policymakers and everyone involved in the daily challenge of getting from point A to point B.

Drift into Failure

Sidney Dekker

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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.

Failure Modes to Failure Codes

John Reeve

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As an improvement initiative, chronic failure analysis may be the most significant benefit yet to be realized by the world of asset management. When stakeholders talk about the accuracy of their CMMS, they are really referring to the absence of good failure data. Consequently, when management requests any type of failure analysis, they are usually thinking of a verbal exercise and talking to people. They think this way because the work order only has text fields describing the problem and remedy. Without actionable data, there is no way to identify worst offenders in Pareto format. Failure Modes to Failure Codes explains exactly how to start capturing a true failure mode in support of RCM. All that’s required is the knowledge to configure the CMMS product.

Key points:

  • If reliability centered maintenance is your goal, failure mode should be your centerpiece as this is the language of RCM.
  • The asset offender report (failure analytic), once implemented, provides the reliability team the ability to identify worst offenders in multiple ways. And never > assume this type of report will exist out of the (CMMS) box.
  • As an improvement initiative, chronic failure analysis offers the largest potential benefit in support of return on asset (ROA).

Specific Failures

Failure to Learn: The BP Texas City Refinery Disaster

Andrew Hopkins

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In Failure to Learn: The BP Texas City Refinery Disaster, respected OHS expert Professor Andrew Hopkins discusses the causes of a major explosion at the Texas City Oil Refinery on March 23, 2005, that killed 15 workers and injured more than 170 others. Failure to Learn also analyses the similarities between this event and the Longford Gas Plant explosion in Victoria in 1998, featured in his earlier book Lessons from Longford. Professor Andrew Hopkins is being recognized by the European Process Safety Centre in October 2008, in recognition of his contribution to safety. Professor Hopkins is the first winner to receive the award, outside of Europe, which is a demonstration of the impact of his valuable work worldwide. Andrew has been awarded a prize by the European Process Safety Centre for “extraordinary contribution to process safety”, the first time this has been awarded outside of Europe. He also appears in the US Chemical Safety Board film on Texas City and has been invited to appear in a subsequent film. Professor Hopkins poses questions such as: Why was the number of victims so large? Who was blamed for the explosion? What were the real causes? Had lessons been learnt from the earlier incident at Longford? Has anything changed as a result of the Texas City accident? The foreword for the book was written by Carolyn Merritt, chair of the CSB at the time of the accident and subsequent inquiry.

Space Systems Failures: Disasters and Rescues of Satellites, Rocket and Space Probes

David M. Harland, Ralph Lorenz

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The very first book on space systems failures written from an engineering perspective. Focuses on the causes of the failures and discusses how the engineering knowledge base has been enhanced by the lessons learned.

Discusses non-fatal anomalies which do not affect the ultimate success of a mission, but which are failures nevertheless.

Describes engineering aspects of the spacecraft, making this a valuable complementary reference work to conventional engineering texts.

Workplace Fatalities: Failure to Predict: A New Safety Discussion on Fatality and Serious Event Reduction

Todd E. Conklin, PhD

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Many organizations tell us that work has never been as safe as it is today. They will show the lowest injury figures ever, and the rosiest incident counts in years. They want to be proud of these accomplishments, and perhaps they should be. But behind these results hides complexity and contradiction—a messiness that Todd Conklin takes us into with this book. For one, it is pretty obvious by now that trying to lower our incident and injury rates leaves the risk of process safety disasters and fatalities pretty much unaffected. Getting better at managing injuries and incidents doesn’t help us prevent fatalities and accidents—we’ve known that for a long time (Salminen, Saari, Saarela, & Rasanen, 1992). The number of fatalities in, say, construction, or the energy industry, has remained relatively stable over the past decades (Amalberti, 2013; National-Safety-Council, 2004), even when many organizations proudly report entire years (or more) without injury. Lowering the injury or non- serious incident rate can actually put an organization at greater risk of accidents and fatalities. In shipping, for example, injury counts were halved over a recent decade, but the number of shipping accidents tripled (Storkersen, Antonsen, & Kongsvik, 2016). In construction, most workers lost their lives precisely in the years with the lowest injury counts (Saloniemi & Oksanen, 1998). And in aviation, airlines with the fewest incidents have the highest passenger mortality risk (Barnett & Wang, 2000). What lies behind these fatalities? Do they really happen because some people don’t wear their personal protective equipment; that some don’t wear gloves when rules say they should? WorkPlace Fatalities: Failure to Predict is the first book for the industry professional that speaks directly to this important challenge: If your organization is so safe - Why do we have fatal and serious events?

Iterate: Ten Lessons in Design and Failure

John Sharp, Colleen Macklin

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How to confront, embrace, and learn from the unavoidable failures of creative practice; with case studies that range from winemaking to animation.

Failure is an inevitable part of any creative practice. As game designers, John Sharp and Colleen Macklin have grappled with crises of creativity, false starts, and bad outcomes. Their tool for coping with the many varieties of failure: iteration, the cyclical process of conceptualizing, prototyping, testing, and evaluating. Sharp and Macklin have found that failure―often hidden, covered up, a source of embarrassment―is the secret ingredient of iterative creative process. In Iterate, they explain how to fail better.

After laying out the four components of creative practice―intention, outcome, process, and evaluation―Sharp and Macklin describe iterative methods from a wide variety of fields. They show, for example, how Radiolab cohosts Jad Abumrad and Robert Krulwich experiment with radio as a storytelling medium; how professional skateboarder Amelia Bródka develops skateboarding tricks through trial and error; and how artistic polymath Miranda July explores human frailty through a variety of media and techniques. Whimsical illustrations tell parallel stories of iteration, as hard-working cartoon figures bake cupcakes, experiment with levitating office chairs, and think outside the box in toothbrush design (“let’s add propellers!”). All, in their various ways, use iteration to transform failure into creative outcomes. With Iterate, Sharp and Macklin offer useful lessons for anyone interested in the creative process.

Case Studies: Allison Tauziet, winemaker; Matthew Maloney, animator; Jad Abumrad and Robert Krulwich, Radiolab cohosts; Wylie Dufresne, chef; Nathalie Pozzi, architect, and Eric Zimmerman, game designer; Andy Milne, jazz musician; Amelia Bródka, skateboarder; Baratunde Thurston, comedian; Cas Holman, toy designer; Miranda July, writer and filmmaker

The Failure of Risk Management: Why It’s Broken and How to Fix It

Douglas W. Hubbard

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An essential guide to the calibrated risk analysis approach The Failure of Risk Management takes a close look at misused and misapplied basic analysis methods and shows how some of the most popular “risk management” methods are no better than astrology! Using examples from the 2008 credit crisis, natural disasters, outsourcing to China, engineering disasters, and more, Hubbard reveals critical flaws in risk management methods–and shows how all of these problems can be fixed. The solutions involve combinations of scientifically proven and frequently used methods from nuclear power, exploratory oil, and other areas of business and government. Finally, Hubbard explains how new forms of collaboration across all industries and government can improve risk management in every field.

Douglas W. Hubbard (Glen Ellyn, IL) is the inventor of Applied Information Economics (AIE) and the author of Wiley’s How to Measure Anything: Finding the Value of Intangibles in Business (978-0-470-11012-6), the #1 bestseller in business math on Amazon. He has applied innovative risk assessment and risk management methods in government and corporations since 1994.

“Doug Hubbard, a recognized expert among experts in the field of risk management, covers the entire spectrum of risk management in this invaluable guide. There are specific value-added take aways in each chapter that are sure to enrich all readers including IT, business management, students, and academics alike” —Peter Julian, former chief-information officer of the New York Metro Transit Authority. President of Alliance Group consulting

“In his trademark style, Doug asks the tough questions on risk management. A must-read not only for analysts, but also for the executive who is making critical business decisions.” —Jim Franklin, VP Enterprise Performance Management and General Manager, Crystal Ball Global Business Unit, Oracle Corporation.

Run to Failure: BP and the Making of the Deepwater Horizon Disaster

Abrahm Lustgarten

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It was Big Oil’s nightmare moment, and the dominoes began falling years before the well was drilled.

Two decades ago, British Petroleum, a venerable and storied corporation, was running out of oil reserves. Along came a new CEO of vision and vast ambition, John Browne, who pulled off one of the greatest corporate turnarounds in history.

BP bought one company after another and then relentlessly fired employees and cut costs. It skipped safety procedures, pumped toxic chemicals back into the ground, and let equipment languish, even while Browne claimed a new era of environmentally sustainable business as his own. For a while the strategy worked, making BP one of the most profitable corporations in the world. Then it all began to unravel, in felony convictions for environmental crimes and in one deadly accident after another. Employees and regulators warned that BP’s problems, unfixed, were spinning out of control, that another disaster―bigger and deadlier―was inevitable. Nobody was listening.

Having reported on business and the energy industry for nearly a decade, Abrahm Lustgarten uses interviews with key executives, former government investigators, and whistle-blowers along with his exclusive access to BP’s internal documents and emails to weave a spellbinding investigative narrative of hubris and greed well before the gulf oil spill.

Failure: Why Science Is So Successful

Stuart Firestein

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The general public has a glorified view of the pursuit of scientific research. However, the idealized perception of science as a rule-based, methodical system for accumulating facts could not be further from the truth. Modern science involves the idiosyncratic, often bumbling search for understanding in uncharted territories, full of wrong turns, false findings, and the occasional remarkable success.

In his sequel to Ignorance (Oxford University Press, 2012), Stuart Firestein shows us that the scientific enterprise is riddled with mistakes and errors - and that this is a good thing! Failure: Why Science Is So Successful delves into the origins of scientific research as a process that relies upon trial and error, one which inevitably results in a hefty dose of failure. In fact, scientists throughout history have relied on failure to guide their research, viewing mistakes as a necessary part of the process. Citing both historical and contemporary examples, Firestein strips away the distorted view of science as infallible to provide the public with a rare, inside glimpse of the messy realities of the scientific process.

An insider’s view of how science is actually carried out, this book will delight anyone with an interest in science, from aspiring scientists to curious general readers. Accessible and entertaining, Failure illuminates the greatest and most productive adventure of human history, with all the missteps along the way.

The Theory of Materials Failure

Richard M. Christensen

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A complete and comprehensive theory of failure is developed for homogeneous and isotropic materials. The full range of materials types are covered from very ductile metals to extremely brittle glasses and minerals. Two failure properties suffice to predict the general failure conditions under all states of stress. With this foundation to build upon, many other aspects of failure are also treated, such as extensions to anisotropic fiber composites, cumulative damage, creep and fatigue, and microscale and nanoscale approaches to failure.

The Big Short: Inside the Doomsday Machine

Michael Lewis

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When the crash of the U. S. stock market became public knowledge in the fall of 2008, it was already old news. The real crash, the silent crash, had taken place over the previous year, in bizarre feeder markets where the sun doesn’t shine, and the SEC doesn’t dare, or bother, to tread: the bond and real estate derivative markets where geeks invent impenetrable securities to profit from the misery of lower- and middle-class Americans who can’t pay their debts. The smart people who understood what was or might be happening were paralyzed by hope and fear; in any case, they weren’t talking.

The crucial question is this: Who understood the risk inherent in the assumption of ever-rising real estate prices, a risk compounded daily by the creation of those arcane, artificial securities loosely based on piles of doubtful mortgages? Michael Lewis turns the inquiry on its head to create a fresh, character-driven narrative brimming with indignation and dark humor, a fitting sequel to his #1 best-selling Liar’s Poker. Who got it right? he asks. Who saw the real estate market for the black hole it would become, and eventually made billions of dollars from that perception? And what qualities of character made those few persist when their peers and colleagues dismissed them as Chicken Littles? Out of this handful of unlikely―really unlikely―heroes, Lewis fashions a story as compelling and unusual as any of his earlier bestsellers, proving yet again that he is the finest and funniest chronicler of our times.