After Ten Years: Enduring Lessons

Wayne Hale · 31 Jan 2013

A change of mind in this piece

The Challenger accident was caused by managers who suppressed engineers' safety concerns for venal reasons.

Recalls holdingFor all those years I had learned the wrong lesson about the loss of Challenger.

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Every claim below was made in this piece, quoted word for word and numbered in the order the piece makes them, so you can read it there rather than take our word for it. The sentence above each quote is our reading of the claim, not their wording. Each quote was checked against a stored copy of the page at build time; where the two differ, the quote is the fact.

Our reading
The Challenger accident was caused by managers who suppressed engineers' safety concerns for venal reasons.

Recalls holdingFor all those years I had learned the wrong lesson about the loss of Challenger.

Their words nowThe sound-bite explanation kept me in ignorance.
Our reading
In a risky organisation, defer to expertise rather than to leaders.

Their wordsDefer to expertise rather than leaders.
Our reading
A team that agrees has not examined the problem hard enough; dissent is what makes a decision safe.

Their wordsIf you don’t have dissention, then you haven’t examined the problem closely enough.
Our reading
NASA denied Shuttle crews parachutes and pressure suits because it had convinced itself the vehicle was as safe as an airliner.

Their wordsWe were told that flying in the space shuttle was just as safe as flying in a commercial airliner, so we denied the crew parachutes and pressure suits.

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The other pieces are the ones whose claims are worded most like this one's. That measures language, not agreement: they may argue the opposite.