Introducing… Failure Mode

Welcome to Failure Mode.

Here’s what Failure Mode is all about. You recall that Bad Thing that happened a while back? It might have been a business collapse, a political scandal, or (more soberly) an actual bad thing: an event in which people were killed. In any case, you read about the Bad Thing in the press at the time. But then, some time after, there’s very often a lengthy report into the specifics of the Bad Thing. Digging into the what, the why, and how to avoid next time.

This blog exists to read that lengthy report, slice it up, and serve interesting morsels back to readers in bite size chunks.

This is (hopefully) interesting for three reasons:

• Journalists are busy and have a tendency to read only the executive summary of lengthy reports. They always get the jist; but often miss details which are both important and juicy (we use ‘juicy’ in the loosest possible sense here. Juicy if you are the sort of person who is interested in detailed analysis of organisation dysfunction, which is… not everyone).
• Bad Things are in their nature abnormal and therefore interesting. But the most interesting thing is the granular, human-scale experience of extreme institutional failure. ‘Bank A failed to appropriately manage risks in its widget derivatives division’ is just a less interesting story than the subject experience of the Bank A’s SVP for Widgets as he or she realises the whole edifice is about to implode… It is only in the lengthy reports that one finds the human side
• In the long term, I imagine this blog as building into a sort of running meta-analysis of the institutional failure. Read enough reports, and perhaps common themes will emerge.

We fail, so you don’t have to…