Complexity Beyond Imagination (Boeing 737 Max)

Complexity Beyond Imagination.pdf

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Idea in Brief:

• Modern products are increasingly intelligent, and their development increasingly complex. Such complexity is managed through documented requirements, but these are decomposed and assigned to subgroups, eventually leading to a lack of product clarity and organizational dysfunction.

• The Systems Engineering methods used to manage complexity are not up to the challenge, and we need Systems Thinking. Product Lifecycles are more complex than we can imagine, and we need to reduce, rather than manage, complexity.

• This paper investigates how complexity and dysfunction led to two crashes and the eventual grounding of the Boeing 737 Max aircraft and notes similarities in the case of the GM Ignition Switch Recall

A quick primer (from my lecture)

A quick primer, as part of another lecture, which posits that a Digital Thread may have recognized, and therefore prevented, the crashes. That said, we do not have business models which would implement this thread.

Additional Resources

"Flying Blind" by Peter Robison

A suspenseful behind-the-scenes look at the dysfunction that contributed to one of the worst tragedies in modern aviation: the 2018 and 2019 crashes of the Boeing 737 MAX.

An "authoritative, gripping and finely detailed narrative that charts the decline of one of the great American companies" (New York Times Book Review), from the award-winning reporter for Bloomberg.