We keep on building systems that experience failure mainly because we don't learn from our previous failures. In fact, if only we made a formal effort to study the cause of previous failures, the 'vast majority' of failures would disappear. This seems to be the thesis of a book on system failures from Joyce Fortune and Geoff Peters.
The phrase 'system failure' normally brings up the usual suspect of 'computer/information system failure' , and that's not surprising. Information Systems chalk up more than their fair share of failures, or at least the failures that are interesting enough to make the news. One of the reasons is that these systems tend to have so much failure is that they are so embedded in organizational life that there are so many points of interaction and therefore so many points at which failure can occur.
Information Systems are also now so entwined in our social and cultural life that we experience failures almost every day, from a dropped internet connection, to a stolen credit card number.
While failures will always happen, a lot less of them would happen if only organizations made proper, formal reviews of what caused previous failures, and then apply the lessons learned, argues Fortune and Peters. To aid in this noble aim, they have devised an approach called the Systems Failure Approach, an approach solidly grounded in the principles of systems thinking. SFA lets its user extract failure events from the real world, construct a systems model of the failure using systems techniques and, from the understanding gained come up with a lesson that can be applied back to the real world.
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