This website is both an archive of some interesting examples of systemic failures of a variety of systems, and also some of my own research around systemic failure, cascade failures, tipping points etc. Its not exhaustive and some sections of the site are curated with assistance of artificial intelligence (AI) tools to help speed things up. Those sections should be viewed as potentially inaccurate and I will try to ensure that they are clearly marked as AI generated.
Research & Analysis
My own analysis, written from a systems and organisational-cognition perspective.
Concepts
- Organisations as cognitive systems — the frame for the whole set: organisations that perceive, remember, decide and learn, and fail at it
- Automation bias — over-reliance on automated output, and how it hardens into organisational failure
- Normalisation of deviance — how the unacceptable becomes routine: a learning loop running backwards
- Tight coupling and interactive complexity — interactive complexity and the vanishing time to respond (Perrow)
- Latent conditions — the dormant, upstream weaknesses that do most of the causal work (Reason)
- Iatrogenic failure — the cure worse than the disease: when the intervention becomes the failure
Case indices
- Systemic failures in the UK — ten cases written up in full, read through a failure-signature lens
- Environmental systemic failures in the UK — pollution, water, nuclear and biosecurity cases
Resources
- UK systemic failure literature — a curated bibliography of academic work
- Data sources for systemic failure research — inquiry archives, incident databases, and systemic-risk data