Disastrous High-Tech Decision Making: From Disasters to Safety

Disastrous High-Tech Decision Making: From Disasters to Safety offers new insights for scholars studying management, decision making, cognition in the wild, and safety in the context of imperatives to continue operations. This book takes you inside the deliberations and action that have produced high-tech disasters in safetycritical enterprises. From primary data and analyses never before considered in scholarly assessments of the Challenger disaster, Frederick F. Lighthall, Professor Emeritus at The University of Chicago, applies the insights of macroergonomics, social psychology, naturalistic decision making, and legal argumentation to this expanded set of documents and data. He argues that the Challenger case represents a prototype of decision making that arises whenever a possibly threatening change in operating conditions becomes evident. In this situation, inevitable in boundarypushing enterprises, four generic decision-making pitfalls await engineers and managers who must decide whether continuing to operate is safe or dangerous. These four decision-making vulnerabilities are also evident, Lighthall argues, in the decision situations of other high-tech disasters both similar (the Columbia shuttle) and dissimilar (Deepwater Horizon oil spill disaster). In Part I of the book Lighthall traces decision participants' chart-by-chart deliberations and argument about whether proceeding with the Challenger's launch would be dangerous. Part II analyzes from contrasting perspectives the dynamics revealed in the narrative. Lighthall's analysis ends by examining the demanding changes in outlook, knowledge disciplines, and learning processes required for safety to compete with the production imperatives of high-tech enterprises operating in unforgiving environments. This book is a must read both for students of management and of engineering who may find themselves working in these high-tech settings, and for managers and engineers who now work in these settings.

Frederick F. Lighthall (PhD Yale University) is Professor Emeritus of educational, social, and organizational psychology at the University of Chicago. A major focus of his research since 1986 has centered on understanding how safety has been thwarted by organizations' production imperatives. Introduced to organizational functioning via intensive training in small group dynamics, he consulted with superintendents and principals of public and private school systems to improve their awareness of the demands and processes of effective communication. Lighthall directed the University of Chicago's National Institutes of Mental Health program to train social psychologists for school systems to help schools analyze and improve their organizational effectiveness. His interest in how organizations function and malfunction, and his dissatisfaction with the adequacy of research on the Challenger disaster (see www.high-techdangers.com ), led to his intensive study of the human processes leading to that decision, and to the study of other disastrous decisions.