The world is full of wonderful products and services that occasionally disappoint and even harm us. Unexpected Consequences: Why The Things We Trust Fail explores the reasons these failures occur, examining them from technological, human, and organizational perspectives. Using more than 40 recent catastrophic events to illustrate its points, the book discusses structural and machine failure, but also the often-overlooked failure of people and of systems related to such things as information technology, healthcare, and security.
As the book demonstrates, faulty technology played a surprisingly small part in many of the scrutinized disasters. Author James William Martin finds cognitive factors and organizational dynamics, including ethics, are major contributors to most unexpected and catastrophic failures causing loss of life and extensive property damage. With that fresh perspective in mind, Martin is able to suggest remedies that address service failure and just may help prevent future disasters from taking place.
"The book's seven chapters provide an interesting, timely perspective on the unique interrelationship among a project's technological design, an organization's culture and dynamics, and social-psychological factors such as attitudes, information filtering, self-concept, social influence, status, self-esteem, and volition as causal factors in the often unexpected and usually catastrophic failures."
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Choice
Anonymous
Posted May 27, 2012
This is a wonderful book which discusses the reasons why several recent catastrophic failures occurred. It also discusses more than 40 other failures of construction and commercial aviation as well as systems in healthcare, information technology, health care, regulatory agencies, security systems and political systems. The interesting aspect of the book is the author analyzes common reasons for failures both technical and non-technical and puts forth suggestions to prevent unnecessary deaths, injuries and property damage in the future. It is also written so non-technical people can easily grasp its many interesting topics.
Overview
The world is full of wonderful products and services that occasionally disappoint and even harm us. Unexpected Consequences: Why The Things We Trust Fail explores the reasons these failures occur, examining them from technological, human, and organizational perspectives. Using more than 40 recent catastrophic events to illustrate its points, the book discusses structural and machine failure, but also the often-overlooked failure of people and of systems related to such things as...