I thinking about pitching "Failure" as my PhD topic :)

[maelorin]

And I think it could be a winner!

If there is anything that really pisses me off, it's failure. Failure to deliver¹, failure to pay attention to the small details², complete failure to implement something that might even remotely work!³ But even worse, failure to accept that failure just might be normal. Even really bright people make mistakes.

I'm still determined to find a way to link Law and Information Systems - but with Failure, I don't think that'll be too hard.

I'm definitely keen on Strategic Thinking, and the Pragmatic kind still looks like a winner.

Key themes in my work will still be Trust and Integrity. And I'm very much an advocate of Simplicity, Flexibility, and Responsibility also.

To be clear, it is not Failing that pisses me off, its the avoidance of being associated with failing. Finding any way possible to Not Be The One Who Failed™. That, IMNSHO, is a real winner of a way to fail. Lots. Big time. That, and completely ignoring anyone who might be even suggesting that your winning approach is, or might be, collapsing around you. What would they know anyway, right?

The Failure I have in mind is systemic, built right into the whole shebang.

Why should anyone be happy with a Fault-tolerant system, when what we really need are fault-coping, or failure-absorbing ones. Perhaps scrapping the stupid Perfection model of Reality™, and replacing it with just looking out the window occasionally? Or leaving the desk for a while. And stop worshipping the Accountancy-susceptible, Economically-imagined bottom-line for a while.

In case you're wondering, I've been reading Frank Furedi's Culture of Fear and Where Have All the Intellectuals Gone? with The Politics of Fear next on my list.

I find myself agreeing with much of what Furedi has to say, and many of his conclusions about what to do about it. For a sociologist, he doesn't suck completely. Even for a Marxist. But I do have my doubts, and my disagreements. Crap. I'm engaging with what I'm reading and all that stuff.

Next I'll be drafting a thesis statement or something.

It may even be that the damn thing morphs and I focus on Fear instead. This is why we have supervisors for theses - to keep a rein on things.

1. "We'll have it to you by Friday" - but you don't - and I'm sure you weren't being general as to any old Friday. Especially as I just paid extra to have it "expressed" - whatever that is ...


2. Like, there ought to be toilets in buildings if people are expected to work in them all day. Some, any. In the original design. Having to retrofit toilets and 'disabled' access to multi-million dollar buildings is just stupid. And they're still 'upgrading' the 'landscaping' around them to achieve accessibility ...


3. Too busy playing politics to actually do your damn job. Or hire someone else to do it for you.

Comments

[verdigriis.livejournal.com]

Sounds interesting.

I'm currently doing a subject on project management in IT, and I read an interesting report that suggested that 31.1% of IT projects will fail utterly and becancelled before completion, 52.7% will suffer time and/or budget blowouts and of the 16.2% that come in on time and on budget about half are missing a lare stack of features that were initially proposed. It is estimated that these failures cost in the 100s of billions of dollars each year. The stats were much worse for large companies than small ones.

The report suggested that the main reason for all this failure was a desperate desire to conceal and ignore failure, or blame it on something else, than to recognise and learn from it...

fear of failure

[reverancepavane.livejournal.com]

Fear of failure often produces worse results than simply failing. This has long been recognized as a problem in the military sphere where the assets (often a euphamism for human beans from the same people that build nuclear devices) can be readily lost in such a situation. A similiar solution occurs in politics where the authorities cannot be seen to be doing nothing. The need to meddle in a situation to prove their innate value often causes problems. Especially when you combine both military and political situations. I like engineering failure analysis, especially when you get to apply it to the jellyware components as well. However the problem with "there are no accidents in accident investigation" is that an engineering failure analysis is quite distinct from a legal failure analysis ("fault" as opposed to "blame"). However few people realise this, which makes working on an accident investigation team such ... fun. Read Feynmann's third semi-autobiography for NASA dealing with the Columbia accident for example. he, the physicist, wanted to know what happened. The rest of the team wanted to know who was getting the blame. Remember that both bureacracies and committees are mechanisms that remove fault and responsibility from individuals, which is why they are so ineffective.

[reverancepavane.livejournal.com]

Then again, as an Erisian, I was always fond of Larry Niven's dolphin's philiosophy. "Every machine should be tested by finding a large spanner and dropping it in the works. If the machine breaks, fix it so it won't. If the machine keeps working, go look for a bigger spanner. This also works for social mechanisms as well." Then again, most of my work has been in fields where the consequences of failure are usually quite serious (as in, people will die), so this definitely reflects on my thinking.