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Years of Internal BP Probes Warned that Neglect Could Lead to Accidents
ProPublica does it again. The “independent, non-profit newsroom that produces investigative journalism in the public interest” has produced a report which indicates that “[a] series of internal investigations over the past decade warned senior BP managers that the company repeatedly disregarded safety and environmental rules and risked a serious accident if it did not change its ways.” This is similar to its analysis of Magnetar’s “Bet Against the American Dream” in the This American Life episode “Eat My Shorts,” about which I blogged a month over a month ago.
I am reminded of many things, personal and professional. As I had worked for major US software publisher, which was then purchased by a major US computer hardware manufacturer, I understand the cost-savings pressures that slide downhill to the lower-level employees. But, as a manager of mine often remarked “This is software, nobody dies.” Lest you surface examples in which that could be true, let me direct you to the fine print packaging for our software, which carried disclaimers that it was not to be used in applications like air traffic control and other situations in which human life was at stake.
The second is a view of the intersection of complex organizations and technology that eschews soundbite searches for causes. The chair of my dissertation committee was Diane Vaughan, who took ten years and nearly a thousand pages to explain “what went wrong” in the catastrophic failure of NASA’s Space Shuttle Challenger. The engineers who tried to “lay down in the bucket” and stop the launch bore terrible personal and professional burdens in the wake of this disaster.
Lastly, as Diane Vaughan has also discovered, controlling unlawful organizational behavior is a more matter for a set of cooperating organizations than for a single entity like an organization or individual. While I agree that Obama’s action could be more decisive, as Bill McKibben has argued, I also argue it is unhelpful if we all ran to that side of the boat. Mainstream and popular views tend to overemphasize leadership and fixes tend to overemphasize technology. We forget that this is all about people, people who are enmeshed in complex social arrangements.
The danger is that by now I have put you all to sleep. News cycles and routines also have conditioned us to expect progress within 24-hour timeframes. I do not wish to offer the paralysis of analysis, or overly mystify these matters. The layperson should understand Vaughan’s approach as the critical and comparative analysis of stories (and other data).
Nor will I argue that we should “let Obama be Obama.” The kick over the furniture approach that some would recommend has clearly backfired, probably because he is at heart such a policy wonk.
However, I will argue that the situation is more complex than the mainstream media and others with sharpened knives would have us believe. If one is at all interested in public reasoning, and therefore democracy, one could do worse than to start with the brief interview with Abrahm Lustgarten, or the fine ProPublica piece.
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