Spencer’s Reviews > To Forgive Design: Understanding Failure > Status Update

When complicated technology and complex professions and flawed individuals interact we can expect failure to follow. Indeed, the longer it does not the more likely the human component of the machines/people system will believe that it will never happen again. That attitude breeds complacency, which leads to a relaxation of guards of all kinds—technological, political, organizational, and psychological—against failure

Most outright bridge failures do not follow months of obvious misbehavior. Rather, they follow times of much more subtle warning signs, which may or may not even be detected or detectable by the naked eye.

Some failures do become legendary, even if their cause remains somewhat uncertain. But it is the failure whose cause is so well established as to be virtually incontrovertible that should be the most widely studied—not just because it was a failure but because it holds a clear lesson.

As theoreticians usually do, we felt superior to the experimentalists, who we thought merely applied our theories. In fact, it would often be the other way around, with the experimental work informing the theories.

"Five people were killed and forty-five hurt because an intended failure did not occur."

"Failures are omnipresent, ubiquitous, mundane, and at the same time both unexpected and ever-expected."