Failure To Launch

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Organization at the Limit: Lessons from the Columbia Disaster

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Organization at the Limit: Lessons from the Columbia Disaster Overviews

Tragedies like the Columbia disaster are distressing reminders that things can go wrong in large, highly regarded organizations. Although we embrace new technologies eagerly, we are reluctant to accept the risks of innovation. Moreover, some technologies and organizations may be too complex to control effectively. What makes some organizations more prone to accidents? Do the very measures taken to increase safety contribute to accidents? Can societies, organizations, and individuals learn from failures and reduce risks?

Against this backdrop, Professors William H. Starbuck of New York University and Moshe Farjoun of York University have invited diverse experts to contribute insights about the Columbia accident and the organizational lessons it suggests. This book thus presents many viewpoints on the complex behavioral factors that led to disaster.

Organization at the Limit: Lessons from the Columbia Disaster RelateItems

• Organizational Learning at NASA: The Columbia and Challenger Accidents (Public Management and Change)
• The Challenger Launch Decision: Risky Technology, Culture, and Deviance at NASA
• Managing the Unexpected: Resilient Performance in an Age of Uncertainty
• NOVA: Columbia - Space Shuttle Disaster
• Normal Accidents: Living with High-Risk Technologies

Organization at the Limit: Lessons from the Columbia Disaster CustomerReview

After two horrible disasters, do you think that NASA has learned from its mistakes, and that it will never happen again? If so, you need to read this book! In 18 well-written chapters, the editors have assembled a set of experts on organizations and disasters to analyze lessons from the Columbia disaster. Because the Challenger disaster foreshadowed many of the problems that subsequently turned up in official investigations of the Columbia disaster, it also figures heavily in this edited book. The authors demonstrate the analytic power of an historically informed organizational analysis of a large governmental agency under strong political pressure to produce results with limited resources.

Two points in particular caught my eye. First, after the Challenger disaster, NASA was supposedly reorganized to place greater emphasis on safety. However, because the organization began to define the space exploration program as a problem of meeting production goals and deadlines, "safety" never achieved the priority in the organization than it deserved. Instead of seeing the space shuttle program as a developmental one, exploring the risky frontier of technological knowledge, NASA officials treated it like any other flight program. Second, as anomalies continued to crop up after flights, engineers and officials began to think about deviations from acceptable practices and outcomes as "normal." As deviation was normalized, unusual events were taken for granted and didn't provoke the kind of response than one would expect from life threatening occurrences.

Scholars interested in organization studies, organizational learning, systems theory, and other academic disciplines will learn much from this book. However, one can also hope that public officials will take its lessons to heart and look more closely at the design of other risky systems that are operating close to the limits of our scientific knowledge.




*** Product Information and Prices Stored:Mar 03, 2010 16:10:17

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