- Seven Deadly Stupidities
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- How do disasters happen?
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The Hindenburg did not just explode. The seeds for its destruction were sown many years earlier when Germany, which was the world’s leader in airship technology, decided to use hydrogen instead of helium to fill the blimps.
The Germans wanted to use helium, since helium was the most stable of gasses. Helium does not bond or react with anything. So why use hydrogen, which is unstable and reacts with everything? Because at that time, the United States was the world’s sole supplier of helium and the Germans, under Hitler’s leadership in the 1930s, wanted no part of relying on the U.S.
The decision to go with hydrogen was the start of the error cascade. The design of the ship changed, materials changed, etc. An early decision-making error was amplified until it created a disaster.
Interesting fact: 62 of the 97 passengers and crew on Hindenburg survived.
See link below for a short clip of the Hindenburg disaster and listen to one of the most famous audio broadcasts of all time.
Error cascades are easy to start and difficult to stop. Say you are waking up early to go for a full-day hike in the nearby foothills. You fail to check the weather since it was a beautiful night when you went to sleep (error number one). You don’t dress properly and pack only enough supplies for an eight-hour trek (error number two). You slow down in the middle of the hike trying to stay warm and the day hike now runs into the dropping temperatures of the evening (error number three). I think you get the picture.
You don’t suddenly get lost or stranded – it all started with bad decision-making involving small things, like checking the weather.
And one more data point for you on how errors form a cascade that leads to catastrophe: doctors fail to wash their hands more than 30% of the time before entering an operating room. Want to speculate where this error cascade will go? Thousands (hundreds of thousands?) of preventable infections and deaths each year.
Keys to Success
Slow down your thinking. We all move too fast.
Consider the worst-case scenario and don’t laugh it off. Really figure out what you would do in such a situation.
Go a little deeper and learn about disasters like the Hindenburg, Titanic, and others. There are valuable lessons to be learned from these catastrophic failures.
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