January 2019
Beginner
158 pages
3h 7m
English
(What You Can Measure, You Might Manage)
Vignette: The Columbia Disaster
Numbers are not everything.
The following is a famous example in which the quantitative approach to decision making led to a faulty decision.
When the Physics Nobel laureate Richard Feynman was investigating the shuttle’s reliability following the Columbia disaster in 1986, he noticed that the probability of a failure was estimated to be 1 in 100,000 by management, but only 1 in 100 by the engineers.29 Instead of accepting the discrepancy of those estimates as a sign of weakness, the management preferred to rely on numbers, numbers that, in hindsight, made no sense. The management’s evaluation was wrong. It gave a false sense ...