A few days ago, I wrote about The Dynamics of Disaster, a book about natural disasters and what we need to know to understand the risk involved in climate-caused disasters. This one is different: this is about the factors that cause human-caused disaster, engineering disasters. Chiles’ point being, it seems, that we are making more and more complex machines and manufacturing processes, too complex for us to handle without a new approach, a new attention to detail, which almost feels unnatural to us.¹

My husband, as I kept telling him, would love this book. It talks about Challenger², Apollo I, Apollo 13, WWII missiles, Dynamite Factory explosions, Engineering bridge collapses, dirigible crashes, Thetis, Sargo, Thresher and other submarine sinkings, the Hubble Telescope aberration, Comet 1 explosions – all things that he would be interested in. He would not be interested in the numerous other building collapses, fertilizer explosions, unsinkable ship sinkings, and airline crashes³ – but I am.

This book also made me think of one of the things that often goes wrong with project management: a lack of transparency about risks and statuses. This happens, in my experience, for two reasons: first, leadership doesn’t want to hear about problems that put the project at risk and so create a culture where making risks transparent is discouraged; and, second, that project team members are too nice, too unwilling to call each other out when the outputs that become inputs cause handoffs to run later than planned. I’ve worked on projects where I’ve told leadership that the scope is not supported by time and resources, and been told to “make it work”. When business leaders on the project refuse to admit that they can’t do it, and then insist on micromanaging production, making themselves the bottleneck in the process; and, when they finally deliver the outputs to the team members in charge of the next phase, days and sometimes weeks late, blame the downstream teams for the delays.

One of the most important things a project manager can do to prevent these issues is educate the executive sponsor: what is within their purview (balancing scope, time, and resources to the project’s advantage; holding business leaders – who often outrank the project managers – accountable; encouraging the project managers to surface roadblocks transparently and regularly, and listening when they do), and speaking truth to power, whether that power is a CEO or a board; and what is not within their purview (micromanaging production or the PM, and expanding scope with all their nervous “I just thought of’s” and brilliant ideas – save those for the next release of the product). I’ve devoted a whole chapter of my book⁴ to this topic.

Perhaps I learned that from this book, which also discusses the topic of effective management and transparency about problems, actually ending the book with a chapter about Rickover, the strategy of effective running backs, and other such manly topics, a chapter which talks about what man needs to do to prevent manly accidents when manufacturing things that explode, or shoot into the air, or fly, or float, or drill, or hold up rooves and whatnot.

Despite the macho tone of this book⁵, it’s a great book, with many insights that have improved my project management philosophy.

If you like books about disasters, this is a fun one to read.

But be careful, as he who shall not be named used to say every Saturday morning on his cartoon, you might learn something if you’re not careful…

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1. Looking at you, ChatGPT. So many people, so many people, make it a practice to skip over the Google AI search results, it’s should tell you something. ↩︎
2. But not Columbia which disastered after the updated version of this book was released. It’s spooky to hear Chiles talk about the space shuttle program as if it were still continuing. Wouldn’t he have fun with Musk’s “rapid unexpected disassembly”? ↩︎
3. My husband has a thing about movies about plane crashes. Especially when we’re traveling by plane. I find shows like Air Disasters reassuring because they figure out what went wrong and put steps into place to prevent it from happening again. See, reassuring. ↩︎
4. Working title, Effective Implementations, tilting not being one of my strengths. ↩︎
5. I don’t hold Chiles responsible. He’s a product of his unenlightened time. But there are plenty of other examples that could have been included that were less manly. ↩︎