I work for a company that “delivers business solutions through information technology”. Last week I was at an offsite where the group got together for 2 days to discuss case studies and how to mitigate risks in our own project.
To set the tone, one of the reading material was an article called “How Complex Systems Fail” by Richard I. Cook. While the context of our discussion was IT systems, I found them extremely relevant to social systems as well.
- Complex systems run as broken systems because it is simply impossible for them to run without multiple flaws being present. They continue to function because the people work resiliently to make it function. Therefore, attributing an accident to a “root cause” is fundamentally wrong. Have there been enough gates built into the system to catch the single/multiple point(s) of failure?
- Complex systems don’t operate on their own. They are often integrated into even more complex systems. A working system running in silo does not guarantee a working system running simultaneously and collaboratively with other systems.
- Systems designer need not to only think about the functional and non-functional requirements, but also the risk of implementation and operation, which include human components as well as technical components. A system that does not evolve presents risk. At the same time, “change introduces new forms of failure”.
- When we make certain decision on top of other decisions, we seldom go back to our original decision and evaluate why things were done that way in the first place. Can the solution feed every need? Was it supposed to? Too often, we look at problems in front of us in silo.
- Failure free operations require experience with failure. How much do we learn from our failures? “The definition of insanity is to do the same thing over and over and expect different results.” – A. Einstein
There has been a lot of emphasis on developing metrics to measure impact for the social entrepreneurs out there finding solutions for the global challenges. I wonder though, would the same emphasis be needed for risk analysis? How do we look at the systems holistically yet still be able to breakdown the problems into smaller pieces so they are analyze-able and solvable?
