The failure is not in solving the problem, it is in the rush to judge who is responsible for a problem. Because the finger pointing scares people from wanting to be involved in solving the problem. It scares people from wanting to propose new ideas or try new things out of fear of being blamed when it goes wrong.
The current mess in the Gulf of Mexico is a very good example of this. Dr. Harrison Schmitt, a geologist and the only scientist to go to the moon (Apollo 17) wrote a VERY good comparison of the current oil spill situation and the fire on Apollo 1 (he uses the internal NASA designation 204). To quote:
“Failure was not an option” for Gene Kranz and his Apollo 13 flight controllers and engineers. In contrast, failure clearly has been an option for President Obama and those claiming to have been on top of this situation “from day one” in his White House and in the Departments of Interior, Energy and Homeland Security. With no single, competent, courageous and knowledgeable leader in charge of a comparably competent, courageous and knowledgeable team as we had with Apollo 13, the Administration has been doomed to failure from the start. The President, without any experience in real-world management of anything, much less a crisis, has no idea how to deal with a situation as technically complex as the Gulf oil spill.
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NASA’s response to the 204 fire was to rapidly implement its previously well-formulated, objective investigation of its causes, both technical and managerial. Managerial responsibilities were identified, and George Low and his engineering team made appropriate changes without a prolonged exercise in finger pointing or the delays of another Presidential, buck-passing “commission.” NASA of that day moved forward and even accelerated the Apollo effort to its successful conclusion. Apollo 8’s Frank Borman, Jim Lovell and Bill Anders orbited the Moon less than two years after the 204 fire. Seven months after that, on July 20, 1969, Apollo 11’s Neil Armstrong and Edwin Aldrin, with Mike Collins in orbit overhead, landed on the Moon.
The lessons from the 204 fire were applied and we moved on. In contrast, President Obama’s and his Administration’s otherwise rambling response to the Deepwater Horizon explosion has been to stop offshore oil exploration by the United States.
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Essential to the prevention of future accidents will be an objective, complete technical and managerial investigation of why a geological and engineering situation of known risks spun out of control. The primary question is, will such an investigation be possible in the politically charged, adversarial “boot on the neck” atmosphere created by President Obama and his team? Imagine if such an atmosphere had surrounded the 204 fire investigation and recovery.
Responsibility for the Deepwater Horizon accident ultimately lies with the chaotic regulatory environment for petroleum exploration created over recent decades by the Congress, courts, Department of the Interior and environmental pressure groups. Will we learn anything about regulatory overkill from this tragic loss of eleven lives, extensive environmental damage, and disruption of business and employment in the Gulf?
A second example of this, on a much smaller scale, has occurred in Calgary in the last week. Last weekend, a small group of ne’er-do-wells decided to steal a city transit bus and take it on a joy-ride. One of the miscreants has been apprehended in part because of an onboard video camera that captured the action. In order to prevent future incidents, Calgary Transit has decided that they must install video cameras on all buses. Excuse me, but isn’t that a knee-jerk reaction to a single event? How often are there problems on a bus where video evidence would be useful in a court of law? Or are we hoping that because Big Brother is watching that it will deter criminal activity? This seems like an unnecessary expense to deal with an uncommon event. If we have a problem with civil behaviour in society, perhaps we need to look at causes, not deal with the after effects.
4 comments
Joshua says:
2 June 2010 at 13:21 (UTC -7 )
Too late.We already have cameras on all our transit systems in the Toronto area.Its too bad really because we have no one to blame but ourselves in the way we treat each other.I use public transit frequently and i dont care if the cameras are there or not.But if someone tries to mug me( and i have been mugged before on public transit),im pleased it will be recorded if it happens again.The police investigation or lack thereof in my case was useless.
Brian says:
2 June 2010 at 14:28 (UTC -7 )
… search for the guilty and punish the innocent.
Don’t agree … just watch how the Obama driven witch hunt unfolds !
BikingBrian says:
5 June 2010 at 17:41 (UTC -7 )
Furthermore, unless there is an obvious act of gross negligence, failure of a complex system is often due to multiple smaller things that didn’t go as expected, with no clear single point cause to point at. Trying to find blame in such a case is akin to trying to find blame for Saturday morning traffic in Los Angeles when there is no obvious cause such as construction or a car crash. Thankfully most technical problems I’m involved with solving aren’t subject to the blame game, allowing us to take away lessons learned so that they don’t happen again.
Cynical Bard says:
9 June 2010 at 10:16 (UTC -7 )
In the case of the Gulf Oil spill, it is necessary to do a complete technical evaluation of what happened to determine if someone, and who, was at fault. But the government has already decided it was criminal. Why?
In the early days of the financial crisis, Rahm Emmanuel, Chief of Staff, said “We can’t let a good crisis go to waste. It lets you do things you can’t do otherwise.” The government took control of several banks, and in the end, perhaps all the major ones.
We can only speculate what the oil spill will be used to justify.