At a friend's (gentle!) urging, I started in a few weeks ago on The Challenger Launch Decision, an exhaustive ethno-history on the work culture that resulted in the Challenger disaster.
I won't bother recounting the Challenger disaster for those unfamiliar—because 1) Wikipedia will do do the job and 2) Wikipedia (and most other sources) will do the job…but they won't do it well.
That's because the received story that we carry in our collective memory about the Challenger disaster is a faulty one.
The public narrative—the one shaped by the media and the Presidential Commission in the wake of the disaster—paint a picture of a management failure, of middle managers driven to sacrifice safety for the sake of schedule and budget.
But that isn't the whole story, as Diane Vaughan's completist sociological study points out. The story was a lot more complicated than that, involving years of risk management and communication issues. In Vaughan's view, blame for the Challenger isn't easily assignable—no one person is at fault, so much as the entire system, comprising the thousands of engineers and administrators at Morton Thiokol and NASA who were responsible, to some degree or another, for the design of the Solid Rocket Boosters.
The story is, to be honest, grossly nuanced, involving all sorts of finicky quality assurance procedures and risk management processes…it's a lot. And once you see how much it is, you equally see how much more seductive the simpler story is: the story we already know.
What this book left me with (besides an unreasonable amount of knowledge about the history of the Challenger disaster) is the uneasy sense that we live with a lot of easy narratives.
If the Challenger is so much more complex than Wikipedia would have me believe, then what other narratives have I blithely adopted into my worldview?
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