Bigger Disasters by Kenneth G.

¶ … Bigger Disasters" by Kenneth G. Brill written on 21st Sept 2010. Brill is the CEO of Uptown institute and an engineer by profession, his credibility cannot be questioned since he has been regularly contributing to variety of business magazines and readers appear to respect his views. The article deals with the subject of latest disasters hitting American including the BP oil spill and Toyota's acceleration problem. The author argues that America will be hit by bigger disasters because there is no system for managing high-consequences/low probability issues.

Brill comments on the latest disasters and some that occurred within the last ten years to indicate a trend of natural and technological disasters hitting America. He argues that the trend will not only continue but future disasters will be bigger in magnitude and impact. He presents some sound logic to support his argument by referring to two important books on the subject namely Normal Accidents by Charles Perrow and James Reason's Managing the Risks of Organizational Accidents.

These books explains how human error is actually a symptom of a failing system and how that leads to disasters. Perrow maintains that when systems become too complex, accidents become a normal occurrence. Reason also endorses that view and states that extremely rigid processes meant to control errors can actually cause more accidents. They have the same argument which is also what Brill supports i.e.

If you try to control the occurrence of an accident, the magnitude and impact of that accident would be far worse than expected or imagined. A rigid process that tries to stop an accident may actually lead to worse accidents. Analysis of the data: The information contained in this article is highly useful and informative for someone who truly wants to understand why America is repeatedly under attack by its own organizations.

There may be variety of other factors too but Brill correctly identifies the presence of complex systems and lack of understanding about low probability issues as the critical factors affecting American accident-prone organizations today. We fail to understand that some of the very high consequence accidents that have low probability of ever occurring are the actual cause of future problems and hence must not be ignored at any cost.

Here we can apply Murphy's law and say that if something can go wrong, it will- given the current organizational system working in America. Limited and justifiable conclusion: We can thus conclude that despite America's best efforts to avoid accidents, there is a good chance that not.