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Normal Accidents: Living with High-Risk Technologies: Difference between revisions
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===Normal accidents=== | ===Normal accidents=== | ||
Where you have a complex system, you should therefore ''expect'' accidents — yes, and opportunities, quirks and serendipities, to be sure, but here we are talking about risk — to arise from unexpected, non-linear | Where you have a complex system, you should therefore ''expect'' accidents — yes, and opportunities, quirks and serendipities, to be sure, but here we are talking about risk — to arise from unexpected, [[non-linear interaction]]s. Such accidents, says Perrow, are “normal”, not in the sense of being regular or expected, but in the sense that ''it is an inherent property of the system to have this kind of accident at some point or other''.<ref>In the forty-year operating history of nuclear power stations, there had (at the time of writing!) been ''no'' catastrophic meltdowns, “... but this constitutes only an “industrial infancy” for complicated, poorly understood transformation systems.” Perrow had a chilling prediction: “... the ingredients for such accidents are there, and unless we are very lucky, one or more will appear in the next decade and breach containment.” Ouch.</ref> | ||
Are financial systems [[complex]]? About as complex as any distributed system known to humankind. Are they tightly coupled? Well, you could ask the principals of [[LTCM]], [[Enron]], Bear Stearns, Amaranth Advisors, [[Lehman]] brothers or Northern Rock, if any of those venerable institutions were still around to tell you about it. But yes. Might mortgage securitisations have been on Perrow’s mind? | Are financial systems [[complex]]? About as complex as any distributed system known to humankind. Are they tightly coupled? Well, you could ask the principals of [[LTCM]], [[Enron]], Bear Stearns, Amaranth Advisors, [[Lehman]] brothers or Northern Rock, if any of those venerable institutions were still around to tell you about it. But yes. Might mortgage securitisations have been on Perrow’s mind? | ||
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Here is the folly of elaborate, [[complicated]] safety mechanisms: adding components to any complex system ''increases'' its complexity. That, in itself, makes dealing with [[system accident]]s, when they occur, ''harder''. The safety mechanisms beloved of the [[middle management]] layer derive from experience. They secure stables from which horses have bolted. They are, as {{author|Jason Fried}} elegantly put it, “organisational scar tissue. Codified responses to situations that are unlikely to happen again.”<ref>{{br|Rework}}, {{author|Jason Fried}}</ref> | Here is the folly of elaborate, [[complicated]] safety mechanisms: adding components to any complex system ''increases'' its complexity. That, in itself, makes dealing with [[system accident]]s, when they occur, ''harder''. The safety mechanisms beloved of the [[middle management]] layer derive from experience. They secure stables from which horses have bolted. They are, as {{author|Jason Fried}} elegantly put it, “organisational scar tissue. Codified responses to situations that are unlikely to happen again.”<ref>{{br|Rework}}, {{author|Jason Fried}}</ref> | ||
They are, in a word, ''linear'' responses to what will be, when it happens, by definition a ''non-linear'' problem. | They are, in a word, ''[[Linear interaction|linear]]'' responses to what will be, when it happens, by definition a ''[[Non-linear interaction|non-linear]]'' problem. | ||
Not only do linear safety mechanisms exacerbate or even create their own accidents, but they also afford a degree of false comfort that encourages managers, who typically have financial targets to meet, not safety ones — to run the system harder, thus increasing the tightness of the coupling between unrelated components. That same Triple A rating that lets your risk officer catch some zeds at the switch encourages your trader to double down. ''I’m covered. What could go wrong?'' | Not only do linear safety mechanisms exacerbate or even create their own accidents, but they also afford a degree of false comfort that encourages managers, who typically have financial targets to meet, not safety ones — to run the system harder, thus increasing the tightness of the coupling between unrelated components. That same Triple A rating that lets your risk officer catch some zeds at the switch encourages your trader to double down. ''I’m covered. What could go wrong?'' | ||