Bias

How A Single Point of Failure Became The Boeing 737 MAX’s Achilles Heel

January 7, 2020 by Nagesh Belludi Leave a Comment

Two thousand nineteen was one of the most turbulent years in Boeing’s history. Its 737 MACS (pardon the pun) troubles went from bad to worse to staggering when aviation regulators around the world grounded the aircraft and a steady trickle of disclosures increasingly exposed software problems and corners being cut.

The flaw in this aircraft, its anti-stall mechanism that relied on data from a single sensor, offers a particularly instructive case study of the notion of single point of failure.

One Fault Could Cause an Entire System to Stop Operating

How a Single Point of Failure, Reliance on one Angle-of-Attack Sensor, Created the Boeing 737 MAX Disaster A single point of failure of a system is an element whose failure can result in the failure of the entire system. (A system may have multiple single points of failure.)

Single points of failures are eliminated by adding redundancy—by doubling the critical components or simply backing them up, so that failure of any such element does not initiate a failure of the entire system.

Boeing Mischaracterized Its Anti-Stall System as Less-than-Catastrophic in Its Safety Analysis

The two 737 MAX crashes (with Lion Air and Ethiopian Airlines) originate from a late-change that Boeing made in a trim system called the Maneuvering Characteristics Augmentation System (MCAS.)

Without the pilot’s input, the MCAS could automatically nudge the aircraft’s nose downwards if it detects that the aircraft is pointing up at a dangerous angle, for instance, at high thrust during take-off.

Reliance on One Sensor is an Anathema in Aviation

The MCAS was previously “approved” by the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA.) Nevertheless, Boeing made some design changes after the FAA approval without checking with the FAA again. The late-changes were made to improve MCAS’s response during low-speed aerodynamic stalls.

The MCAS system relied on data from just one Angle-of-Attack (AoA) sensor. With no backup, if this single sensor were to malfunction, erroneous input from that sensor would trigger a corrective nosedive just after take-off. This catastrophe is precisely what happened during the two aircraft crashes.

The AoA sensor thus became a single point of failure. Despite the existence of two angle-of-attack sensors on the nose of the aircraft, the MCAS system not only used data from either one of the sensors but also did not expect concurrence between the two sensors to infer that the aircraft was stalling. Further, Lion Air did not pay up to equip its aircraft with a warning light that could have alerted the crew to a disagreement between the AoA sensors.

Boeing Missed Safety Risks in the Design of the MAX’s Flight-Control System

Reliance on one sensor’s data is an egregious violation of a long-standing engineering principle about eliminating single points of failure. Some aircraft use three duplicate systems for flight control: if one of the three malfunctions, if two systems agree, and the third does not, the flight control software ignores the odd one out.

Angle-of-Attack Sensor on Boeing 737 MAX Aircraft - Single Point of Failure that Contributed to Two Crashes If the dependence on one sensor was not enough, Boeing, blinded by time- and price-pressure to stay competitive with its European rival Airbus, intentionally chose to do away with any reference to MCAS in pilot manuals to spare pilot training for its airline-customers. Indeed, Boeing did not even disclose the existence of the MCAS on the aircraft.

Boeing allows pilots to switch the trim system off to override the automated anti-stall system, but the pilots of the ill-fated Lion Air and Ethiopian Airlines flights failed to do so.

Idea for Impact: Redundancy is the Sine Qua Non of Reliable Systems

In preparation for airworthiness recertification for the 737 MAX, Boeing has corrected the MCAS blunder by having its trim software compare inputs from two AoA sensors, alerting the pilots if the sensors’ readings disagree, and limiting MCAS’s authority.

One key takeaway from the MCAS disaster is this: when you devise a highly reliable system, identify all single points of failure, and investigate how these risks and failure modes can be mitigated. Examine if every component of a product or a service you work on is a single point of failure by asking, “If this component fails, does the rest of the system still work, and, more importantly, does it still do the function it is supposed to do?”

Lessons from the Collision on Tenerife, the World’s Worst Aviation Disaster [Book Summary]

November 5, 2019 by Nagesh Belludi Leave a Comment

Jon Ziomek’s nonfiction history book Collision on Tenerife (2018) is the result of years of analysis into the world’s worst aviation disaster on Tenerife Island in the Canary Islands of Spain.

Distinct Small Errors Can Become Linked and Amplified into a Big Tragedy

On 27-March-1977, two fully loaded Boeing 747 passenger jets operated by Pan American World Airways (Pan Am) and KLM Royal Dutch Airlines collided on the runway, killing 583 passengers and crew on the two airplanes. Only 61 survived—all from the Pan Am jet, including its pilot.

These two flights, and a few others, were diverted to Tenerife after a bomb went off at the Gran Canaria Airport in Las Palmas, their original destination. Tenerife was not a major airport—it had a single runway, and taxi and parking space were limited. After the Las Palmas airport reopened, flights were cleared for takeoff from Tenerife, but the fog rolled in over Tenerife reducing visibility to less than 300 feet. Several airplanes that had been diverted to Tenerife had blocked the taxiway and the parking ramp. Therefore, the KLM and Pan Am jets taxied down the single runway in preparation for takeoff, the Pan Am behind the KLM.

Tenerife airport disaster: Pan Am and KLM Aircraft

At one end of the runway, the KLM jet turned 180 degrees into position for takeoff. In the meantime, the Pan Am jet was still taxiing on the runway, having missed its taxiway turnoff in the fog. The KLM pilot jumped the gun and started his take-off roll before he got clearance from traffic control.

When the pilots of the two jets caught sight of each other’s airplanes through the fog, it was too late for the Pan Am jet to clear out of the runway into the grass and for KLM jet to abort the takeoff. The KLM pilot lifted his airplane off the runway prematurely, but could not avoid barreling into the Pan Am’s fuselage at 240 kmph. Both the jets exploded into flames.

The accident was blamed on miscommunication—breakdown of coordinated action, vague language from the control tower, the KLM pilot’s impatience to takeoff without clearance, and the distorted cross-talk of the KLM and Pan Am pilots and the controllers on a common radio channel.

Breakdown of Coordination Under Stress

Sweeping changes were made to international airline regulations following the accident: cockpit procedures were changed, standard phrases were introduced, and English was emphasized as a common working language.

In Collision on Tenerife, Jon Ziomek, a journalism professor at Northwestern University, gives a well-written, detailed account of all the mistakes leading up to the crash and its aftermath.

The surviving passengers’ first- and second-hand accounts recall the horror of those passengers on the right side of the Pan Am jet who saw the lights of the speeding KLM 747, just as the Pan Am pilot was hastily turning his airplane onto the grass to avoid the collision.

Ziomek describes how passengers escaped. Some had to make the difficult choice of leaving loved ones or friends and strangers behind.

Dorothy Kelly … then spotted Captain Grubbs lying near the fuselage. Badly burned and shaken by his jump from the plane, he could not move. “What have I done to these people?” he yelled, pounding the ground in anguish. Kelly grabbed him under his shoulders and urged “Crawl, Captain, crawl!”

Recommendation: Read Jon Ziomek’s Collision on Tenerife

Some of the bewildering details make for difficult reading—especially the psychological effects (post-traumatic stress syndrome) on the surviving passengers. But Jon Ziomek’s Collision on Tenerife is important reading, providing a comprehensive picture of the extensive coordination required in aviation, the importance of safety and protocols, and how some humans can freeze in shock while others spring into action.

The key takeaway is the recognition of how small errors and problems (an “error chain”) can quickly become linked and amplified into disastrous outcomes.

Beware of Key-Person Dependency Risk

September 7, 2018 by Nagesh Belludi

Beware of Key-Person Dependency Risk

Key-Person Dependency Risk is the threat posed by an organization or a team’s over-reliance on one or a few individuals.

The key-person has sole custody of some critical institutional knowledge, creativity, reputation, or experience that makes him indispensable to the organization’s business continuity and its future performance. If he/she should leave, the organization suffers the loss of that valued standing and expertise.

Small businesses and start-ups are especially exposed to key-person dependency risk. Tesla, for example, faces a colossal key-man risk—its fate is linked closely to the actions of founder-CEO Elon Musk, who has come under scrutiny lately.

Much of Berkshire Hathaway’s performance over the decades has been based on CEO Warren Buffett’s reputation and his ability to wring remarkable deals from companies in duress. There’s a great deal of prestige in selling one’s business to Buffett. He is irreplaceable; given his remarkable long-term record of accomplishment, it is important that much of what he has built over the years remains intact once he is gone. Buffett has built a strong culture that is likely to endure.

Key Employees are Not Only Assets, but also Large Contingent Liabilities

The most famous “key man” of all time was Apple’s Steve Jobs. Not only was he closely linked to his company’s identity, but he also played a singular role in building Apple into the global consumer-technology powerhouse that it is. Jobs had steered Apple’s culture in a desired direction and groomed his handpicked management team to sustain Apple’s inventive culture after he was gone. Tim Cook, the operations genius who became Apple’s CEO after Jobs died in 2011, has led the company to new heights.

The basic solution to key-person dependency risk is to identify and document critical knowledge of the organization. (Capturing tacit knowledge is not easy when it resides “in the key-person’s head.”) Organizations must also focus on cross-training and succession planning to identify and enable others to develop and perform the same tasks as the key-person.

Idea for Impact: No employee should be indispensable. A well-managed company is never dependent upon the performance of one or a few individuals. As well, no employee should be allowed to hoard knowledge, relationships, or resources to achieve job security.

Why Risk Mitigation and Safety Measures Become Ineffective: Risk Homeostasis and Peltzman Effect [Mental Models]

May 17, 2018 by Nagesh Belludi Leave a Comment

Risk Homeostasis and Peltzman Effect are two concepts relating to how humans react to risks.

Risk Homeostasis is the notion that our personal psychological frameworks comprise a target level of risk towards which we direct our efforts.

We measure risk on our own “risk thermostat.” Because the risk in our environment changes continuously, we are incessantly forced away from our target risk level, but revert toward it by counteracting those external influences.

If the perceived risk of a situation exceeds our target level, we undertake defensive actions to reduce the risk. And if the perceived risk is lower than our target level, we attempt to increase our risk back to our target level by exposing ourselves to dangerous actions.

Why Risk Mitigation and Safety Measures Become Ineffective Consequently, people take more risks when they’re forced to act more carefully. For instance, requiring motorcycle bikers to wear helmets may make them take more risks—to maintain their level of thrill, not to get into accidents.

Peltzman Effect is the notion that people respond to increased safety by adding new risks. The namesake, economist Sam Peltzman, argued in 1975 that when automobile safety rules were introduced, at least some of the benefits of the new safety rules were counterbalanced by changes in the behavior of drivers. Peltzman posited that making seatbelts mandatory for cars resulted in reducing the number of occupant fatalities, but increased pedestrian casualties and collision-related property damages.

Peltzman made a case that even though seatbelts reduced the risk of being severely injured in an accident, drivers compensated by driving aggressively and carelessly—driving closer to the car ahead of them, for instance—so as to save time or maintain their level of thrill, even at the risk of causing damage beyond themselves and their cars.

Risk Homeostasis and Peltzman Effect remain controversial theories. Despite their apparent relevance, the prevailing evidence remains inadequate and inconclusive about how people behave less cautiously when they feel more protected and vice versa.

Further, Risk Homeostasis and Peltzman Effect challenge the foundations of safety and injury-prevention policies. They assert that the only effective safety measures are those that alter individuals’ desired risk level. Anything that barely modifies the environment or regulates individuals’ behavior without affecting their target risk levels is useless.

What Your Messy Desk Says About You

March 13, 2018 by Nagesh Belludi Leave a Comment

What Your Messy Desk Says About You

Appearances are Important

Your office and desk must seem organized. A messy office or a cluttered desk can not only impede your space and cramp your style, but also affect how your peers and superiors perceive you.

Clutter can drag you down, sap your energy, and reduce your efficiency. However, if clutter is your style, you should have every right to work the way you like to work.

A messy desk isn’t a professional flaw, but clutter may reflect of your competence. Untidiness can give an impression that your job may be too much for you to handle, or that you can’t get your thoughts and information organized.

How to Conquer Your Paperwork Crisis

As opposed to sorting through everything in your drawers, desktop, and filing systems, consider removing the whole lot somewhere else and only allowing the important things back.

Stephanie Winston, author of The Organized Executive, famously wrote that each clutter represents a decision not made. In this bestselling book, she recommends the “TRAF” system, a precursor to the “Inbox Zero” discipline that I’ve previously discussed on this blog. TRAF is an acronym for the four decisions you must make on each piece of paper that arrives at your desk. You can Toss it away, Refer or delegate it to someone else, Act on it, or File it if it absolutely deserves to be achieved. Don’t keep anything merely for reasons of habit or for sentimental reasons.
Don’t start tomorrow with today’s mess. Spending ten minutes at the end of your workday gearing your desk up for the next day can help you stay organized.

After you’ve taken steps to reorganize your office, sustain your system. Look for ways to further streamline and fine-tune your organization framework.

Idea for Impact: Don’t Let Clutter Spin Out of Control and Affect Other’s Perceptions

Taking too much time to organize can be just as ineffective—don’t end up spending so much time organizing that you don’t have the time to do anything else. (This is one of the shortcomings of David Allen’s Getting This Done system.) Learn to put things away as soon as you’re done working on them.

Being organized not only means less time wasted looking for things, but also rewards you with a greater sense of control and a favorable professional image.

Lessons from Peter Drucker: Quit What You Suck At

March 1, 2018 by Nagesh Belludi 1 Comment

Peter Drucker and Jack Welch on Strategic Prioritization: Strengthen or Abandon

The essence of leadership is risk- and opportunity-assessment and resource allocation. It follows that one of the persistent responsibilities of leadership is to mull over each individual and organizational endeavor and investigate, “Do we produce results that are meaningful and profitable enough for us to justify investing our resources to this purpose?”

Jack Welch’s Strategy for General Electric: #1 or #2 Businesses Only

When Jack Welch became CEO of General Electric (GE) in 1981, he set out to make GE “the world’s most competitive enterprise.” However, the company was a hodgepodge of many businesses—some unrelated or irrelevant, several unprofitable, and a few at the brink of failure.

Management pioneer Peter Drucker famously advised Welch to ask of each constituent of the GE business portfolio he now presided over, “If you weren’t already this business, would you enter it today? And, if the answer is no, what are you going to do about it?”

Welch’s responded with his legendary dictum that every GE division be—or become—the leading or the runner-up business in its respective industry, or plan to exit it completely.

Welch argued that in many markets, the number three, four, five, or six players suffered the most during cyclical downturns. On the contrary, number one or number two businesses could protect their market share by way of aggressive pricing approaches or by developing new products. Welch’s approach portended the emergence of oligopolies in many industries.

The resultant strategic focus eventually led to an immense restructuring of GE. Welch sold or discontinued dozens of divisions—including computers and time-shares. Over the next decade, he cut nearly one in four jobs at GE, warranting the nickname “Neutron Jack.”

By year 2000, GE had reached dominance or near dominance in most of its business markets across the globe.

Peter Drucker on Strategic Reprioritization

Explaining this method of strategic reprioritization, Drucker wrote in Post-Capitalist Society (1993,)

To turn around any institution—whether a business, a labor union, a university, a hospital, or a government—requires always the same three steps:

Abandonment of the things that do not work, the things that have never worked; the things that have outlived their usefulness and their capacity to contribute;

Concentration on the things that do work, the things that produce results, the things that improve the organization’s capacity to perform; and

Analysis of the half successes, half failures. A turnaround requires abandoning whatever does not perform and doing more of whatever does perform.

Drucker further elaborated on abandonment as the keystone for strategic reprioritization in his Five Most Important Questions (2015,)

To abandon anything is always bitterly resisted. People in any organization are always attached to the obsolete—the things that should have worked but did not, the things that once were productive and no longer are. They are most attached to what in an earlier book I called “investments in managerial ego.” Yet abandonment comes first. Until that has been accomplished, little else gets done. The acrimonious and emotional debate over what to abandon holds everybody in its grip. Abandoning anything is thus difficult, but only for a fairly short spell. Rebirth can begin once the dead are buried; six months later, everybody wonders, “Why did it take us so long?”

Idea for Impact: Assess What Endeavors Must Be Intensified or Abandoned

Don’t do—or continue to do—something just because it’s been a tradition, custom, or habit. Strengthen, abandon, or stay on. Align your efforts with your mission, your values, and the results you want to achieve.

If you abandon something important mistakenly, you can quickly pick up where you left off.

Invest your precious resources where the returns are rich.

Figure out what’s vital and stay focused, even if you have to cut your losses (read about sunk costs.)

Warren Buffett’s Advice on How to Focus on Priorities and Subdue Distractions

December 8, 2017 by Nagesh Belludi Leave a Comment

If you persistently experience an overpowering sense of being besieged with tasks and responsibilities, perhaps a personal productivity transformation technique suggested by Warren Buffett may help.

Psychologist Angela Duckworth of the University of Pennsylvania shares a well-known anecdote about Buffett in her bestselling Grit: The Power of Passion and Perseverance:

The story goes like this: Buffett turns to his faithful pilot and says that he must have dreams greater than flying Buffett around to where he needs to go. The pilot confesses that, yes, he does. And then Buffett takes him through three steps.

First, you write down a list of twenty-five career goals.

Second, you do some soul-searching and circle the five highest-priority goals. Just five.

Third, you take a good hard look at the twenty goals you didn’t circle. These you avoid at all costs. They’re what distract you; they eat away time and energy, taking your eye from the goals that matter more.

As I’ve written before (see the world’s shortest course in time management, and detailed three-step course on time logging, time analysis, time budgeting,) the most effective time management practice involves eliminating the non-essentials—those numerous things you can and want to do—and focusing on the very few things you must do.

Idea for Impact: Success comes at a cost: the most time-effective folks I know are significantly better at dropping their second-rate objectives.

Choose Your Role Models Carefully

November 17, 2017 by Nagesh Belludi Leave a Comment

Chose Your Role Models Carefully Heroes and role models are very useful—they embody a higher plateau of cognitive and emotional truth, knowledge, and accomplishment that you can aspire to.

But the modern world has a dangerous problem with hero-worship: pop artists, rappers, film stars, sportspersons, capitalists, and so on command attention and affection as never before. This 2013 Financial Times article noted, “Way back in 2008, the three most admired personalities in sport were probably Tiger Woods, Lance Armstrong and Oscar Pistorius. They were portrayed not just as great athletes but as great men, role models….” And all these three popular heroes fell from grace.

While admiring and drawing wisdom, meaning, and inspiration from heroes can be constructive, you must take “hero narratives” with a grain of salt. The Buddha warned us not to trust anybody or anything just because it seems logical or it resonates with our feelings. He advised that we test our hypotheses by the results they yield when put into practice and shield our minds against the risk of biases or other limitations of our ability to discern from our experiences wisely. According to the Kalama Sutta, an aphorism of the historical Buddha that has been preserved orally by his followers (translated from the Pali by the eminent American Buddhist monk and prolific author Thanissaro Bhikkhu,)

Now, Kalamas, don’t go by reports, by legends, by traditions, by scripture, by logical conjecture, by inference, by analogies, by agreement through pondering views, by probability, or by the thought, ‘This contemplative is our teacher.’ When you know for yourselves that, ‘These qualities are skillful; these qualities are blameless; these qualities are praised by the wise; these qualities, when adopted & carried out, lead to welfare & to happiness’—then you should enter & remain in them.

Idea for Impact: Don’t blindly place much faith in today’s experts and celebrities. Realize the truth yourself.

How to Guard Against Anything You May Inadvertently Overlook

October 23, 2017 by Nagesh Belludi Leave a Comment

The World is More Inundated with Uncertainties and Errors Than Ever Before

Checklists can help you learn about prospective oversights and mistakes, recognize them in context, and sharpen your decisions.

I am a big fan of Harvard surgeon and columnist Atul Gawande‘s The Checklist Manifesto (2009.) His bestseller is an engaging reminder of how the world has become so complex.

The use of the humble checklist can help you manage the myriad of complexities that underlie most contemporary professional (and personal) undertakings—where what you must do is too complex to carry out reliably from memory alone. Checklists “provide a kind of a cognitive net. They catch mental flaws inherent in all of us—flaws of memory and attention and thoroughness.”

Gawande begins The Checklist Manifesto with an examination of the characteristics of errors from ignorance (mistakes you make because you don’t know enough—“much of the world and universe is—and will remain—outside our understanding and control”), and errors of ineptitude (mistakes you make because you don’t apply correctly what you know.) Most human and organizational failures involve the latter.

The philosophy is that you push the power of decision making out to the periphery and away from the center. You give people the room to adapt, based on their experience and expertise. All you ask is that they talk to one another and take responsibility. That is what works.

The surgery room, Gawande’s own profession, is the principal setting for many of the book’s illustrative examples of how the introduction of checklists dramatically reduced the rate of complications from surgery. He also provides handy stories from other realms of human endeavor—aviation, structural engineering, and Wall Street-investing.

Getting Things Right, Every Time

Checklists are particularly valuable in situations where the stakes are high enough, but your impulsive thought process could lead to suboptimal decisions.

The benefits of checklists also feature prominently in the thought-provoking Think Twice: Harnessing the Power of Counterintuition (2012.) The author, Credit Suisse Investment analyst and polymath Michael J. Mauboussin, argues that checklists are more effective in certain domains than in others:

A checklist’s applicability is largely a function of a domain’s stability. In stable environments, where cause and effect is pretty clear and things don’t change much, checklists are great. But in rapidly changing environments that are heavily circumstantial, creating a checklist is a lot more difficult. In those environments, checklists can help with certain aspects of the decision. For instance, an investor evaluating a stock may use a checklist to make sure that she builds her financial model properly.

A good checklist balances two opposing objectives. It should be general enough to allow for varying conditions, yet specific enough to guide action. Finding this balance means a checklist should not be too long; ideally, you should be able to fit it on one or two pages.

If you have yet to create a checklist, try it and see which issues surface. Concentrate on steps or procedures, and ask where decisions have gone off track before. And recognize that errors are often the result of neglecting a step, not from executing the other steps poorly.

In addition to creating checklists that are specific enough to guide action but general enough to handle changing circumstances, Mauboussin recommends keeping a journal to gather feedback from past decisions and performing “premortems” by envisioning that a imminent decision has already been proven wrong, and then identifying probable reasons for the failure.

No Matter How Proficient You May Be, Well-designed Checklists Can Immeasurably Improve the Outcomes

Checklists Can Immeasurably Improve the Outcomes The notion of making and using checklists is so plainly obvious that it seems impracticable that they could have so vast an effect.

Investor Charlie Munger, the well-respected beacon of wisdom and multi-disciplinary thinking, has said, “No wise pilot, no matter how great his talent and experience, fails to use his checklist.” And, “I’m a great believer in solving hard problems by using a checklist. You need to get all the likely and unlikely answers before you; otherwise it’s easy to miss something important.”

Idea for Impact: Checklists can prevent many things that could go wrong in the hands of human beings, given our many well-documented biases and foibles. Well-designed checklists not only make sure that all the can-be-relied upon elements are in place in complex decision-making, but also provide for flexibility and room for ad hoc judgment.

Let Go of Sunk Costs

July 4, 2017 by Nagesh Belludi Leave a Comment

When people put their weight behind an idea or a belief, they become invested in it. They are likely to fight its corner rather than discard that idea or renounce their prior decision.

This tendency to throw good resources after bad, rather than cut losses, is the Sunk Cost Fallacy.

Quitting is Not Always Wrong

People frequently become stuck with poor decisions that they keep holding on to in hopes that they will eventually prove their efforts worthwhile. Here’s Nobel laureate in economics Daniel Kahneman (author of Thinking, Fast and Slow, the bestselling exposition of human irrationality) in an interview with financial journalist Morgan Housel:

When I work I have no sunk costs. I like changing my mind. Some people really don’t like it but for me changing my mind is a thrill. It’s an indication that I’m learning something. So I have no sunk costs in the sense that I can walk away from an idea that I’ve worked on for a year if I can see a better idea. It’s a good attitude for a researcher. The main trap that young researchers fall into is sunk costs. They get to work on a project that doesn’t work and that is not promising but they keep at it. I think too much persistence can be bad for you in the intellectual world.

Don’t Become Biased Against Quitting

Sunk cost fallacy, also called the Concorde Effect Sunk cost fallacy is why people who have already wasted money on tickets to an awful movie continue to watch it to the end and waste their time instead of walking out of the cinema hall. It’s the urge to justify previous decisions using the next one—for example, when people force themselves to munch their way through an unsavory meal at a restaurant or when people waste time in dead-end romantic relationships because they’ve already devoted so much time to the relationships and irrationally hope things will improve someway.

Some leaders continue a project once an initial investment is made and found flawed because stopping the project would be tantamount to conceding that previously-allocated resources have been wasted. For this reason, the sunk cost fallacy is also called the ‘Concorde Effect’ after the Anglo-French supersonic jet. In the ’60s, even though there was never a sufficient demand from airlines for the Concorde, the British and French governments continued to subsidize the development and production of the Concorde instead of admitting that they had wasted billions on a non-viable undertaking. The airline industry had long understood that the economics of supersonic transport were dubious, which had forced Americans to abandon their preliminary studies of supersonic jets.

Idea for Impact: Let to Cut Your Losses When Something’s Not Working

Sunk cost fallacy - Know How to Cut Your Losses When Something's Not Working Sunk costs are backward-looking decisions. Don’t become excessively focused on a specific goal or outcome—you’ll become inflexible and unyielding. You’ll narrow your options and make yourself feel more limited and inhibited.

Don’t get attached to ideas and become affected by the sunk cost fallacy as your projects develop. Remain objective, identify the warning signs of losing propositions, and abandon lost causes where sensible. As the American cartoonist Charles Schulz of Peanuts fame once said, “No problem is so formidable that you cannot walk away from it.”

Bias

One Fault Could Cause an Entire System to Stop Operating

Boeing Mischaracterized Its Anti-Stall System as Less-than-Catastrophic in Its Safety Analysis

Reliance on One Sensor is an Anathema in Aviation

Boeing Missed Safety Risks in the Design of the MAX’s Flight-Control System

Idea for Impact: Redundancy is the Sine Qua Non of Reliable Systems

Wondering what to read next?

Distinct Small Errors Can Become Linked and Amplified into a Big Tragedy

Breakdown of Coordination Under Stress

Recommendation: Read Jon Ziomek’s Collision on Tenerife

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Key Employees are Not Only Assets, but also Large Contingent Liabilities

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Appearances are Important

How to Conquer Your Paperwork Crisis

Idea for Impact: Don’t Let Clutter Spin Out of Control and Affect Other’s Perceptions

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Jack Welch’s Strategy for General Electric: #1 or #2 Businesses Only

Peter Drucker on Strategic Reprioritization

Idea for Impact: Assess What Endeavors Must Be Intensified or Abandoned

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Wondering what to read next?

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The World is More Inundated with Uncertainties and Errors Than Ever Before

Getting Things Right, Every Time

No Matter How Proficient You May Be, Well-designed Checklists Can Immeasurably Improve the Outcomes

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Quitting is Not Always Wrong

Don’t Become Biased Against Quitting

Idea for Impact: Let to Cut Your Losses When Something’s Not Working

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