Drift into failure: Micro Review
Professor Sidney Dekker’s “Drift into failure” looks like an easy read. Don’t be deceived. It was a very dense read and took some time for me to refresh and learn many related concepts along the way — rational choice theory, cybernetics, exegesis and eisegesis, reductionism, dualism, epistemology (to name a few :))
The author makes a great case for using systems thinking and complex theory to analyze large failures instead of leveraging the typical “examine the failed component and fix it” approach (the Newton-Descarte approach).
It was a very interesting read and though the failures mentioned in the book focused on airplane accidents, oil rig explosions and NASA shuttle tragedy, the concepts inspired me to find a parallel in any Corporate as well as in Enterprise IT.
An enterprise is definitely a complex system with all its processes, capabilities, people & technology interacting with each other and different external forces defined by Porter over a period spanning decades.
And you can use the concepts in the book to analyze how it drifts into any behavior. That behavior could a catastrophic accident if the drift is away from safety or it could be into irrelevance if the drift is away from delivering business value.
Very thought provoking read.
