Engineering Failures and What We Have Learned from Them

Engineering is the only profession that names its failures after the places where they happened. Doctors have "complications". Economists have "corrections". Engineers have Tacoma Narrows, Chernobyl, Challenger, the Hyatt Regency walkway. There is nowhere to hide when your mistake is 300 metres long and visible from the highway. That brutal public accountability produced something unusual - a body of hard-won knowledge about how complicated things go wrong. It turns out that bridges, marriages, startups, cities and dinner parties fail in remarkably similar ways. Here are ten lessons that cost lives and fortunes to learn, offered here for free. 1. Things break at the seams, not in the middleIn September 1999, the Mars Climate Orbiter arrived at Mars after nine months and roughly 125 million dollars of flawless flight, dipped far too low into the atmosphere, and stopped existing. The cause was not a faulty part. Lockheed Martin's software reported thruster impulse in pound-force…