From a mailing list, a recommendation for a book on failures in complex systems:
Normal Accidents analyzes the social side of technological risk. Charles Perrow argues that the conventional engineering approach to ensuring safety–building in more warnings and safeguards–fails because systems complexity makes failures inevitable. He asserts that typical precautions, by adding to complexity, may help create new categories of accidents. (At Chernobyl, tests of a new safety system helped produce the meltdown and subsequent fire.) By recognizing two dimensions of risk–complex versus linear interactions, and tight versus loose coupling–this book provides a powerful framework for analyzing risks and the organizations that insist we run them.
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