You Mess Up, People Die: Dealing with Failure in High-risk Environments

Have you ever worked on a system where, if it fails, people may wind up dead?How do you deal with risk, and with inevitable screw-ups? Andwhat can you learn from high-risk engineering, even if failure …

Have you ever worked on a system where, if it fails, people may wind up dead?How do you deal with risk, and with inevitable screw-ups? Andwhat can you learn from high-risk engineering, even if failure of your productsis only met with annoyed eye-rolls, not blood-curdling screams?How do pilots deal with big or small failures? How do doctors? How do engineerswho build safety-critical systems?There are tools to deal with this: technical, or process-related, but most crucially cultural: how to make it safe for your colleagues to mess up?Safe technically, but moreso emotionally.Because if you make it emotionally safe to fail, you enable discussions about ways the system might fail – will fail, given enough time – and what to do about them.And it will give you a shot at reacting quickly, gracefully, correctly once you inevitably encounter failure.Inviting your engineers to fail might be the most safety-conscious thing youwill ever do.