Disaster by Management

NASA and Columbia

  • Parallel chains of command: engineering, mission, NASA center line structures
  • External constraints on NASA shifted resources and risk managers' attention from precautionary principles to managerialist concerns
  • Risk assessors have lower status than risk managers, increasing social distance for risk messages on the way up

FBI and 9/11

  • Parallel, firewalled chains of command: intelligence and criminal investigation
  • Top level internal investigations into FISA abuses and racial profiling encouraged low level HQ analysts to tune out field office and translator risk communications
  • Top level management did not communicate risk messages down at HQ, which prevented contextualization for risk messages coming up from geographically dispersed field offices

 
 
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