This day in engineering history

Today is the anniversary of the collapse of the Tacoma Narrows Bridge in Washington State in 1940. It's a sad day, of course, because it commemorates a failure. Fortunately, no was was hurt but it was still a waste of both money and time. And it could have ended terribly. I won't go over the whole story. It's documented many places as well in this Wikipedia article. But the importance of remembering failures is to learn from them. It doesn't help anyone to just say, "It was their fault." The failure of this bridge led to changes in the way bridges are designed and made everyone a bit safer.

This is one of those things that is true for engineering and true for our life in general. While it is important to get to the bottom of a problem, it doesn't help to just punish the people responsible. You need their cooperation in getting to the bottom of the problem. You need them to be open about the problems they faced and why they made certain decisions. I'm not saying you don't punish people who willfully disregard good design practices. But when someone is trying to do something no one else has done before, you must take into consideration that they had no path to follow for part of their project. Simply looking for scapegoats and making a big show of punishing them doesn't prevent future problems. It might cause people to be less willing to try things that are absolutely assured of success but it doesn't help us progress.

This is one of the nice things I like about the company I work for. When problems arise, everyone works together to solve the problem and learn why it failed and how to keep it from happening in the future. Sometimes, people are punished or fired when their methods were way outside normal engineering practices or they were intentionally deceptive in their methods. But nothing slows down innovation that making a big show of punishing people who were just trying to do something new.

Here's an interesting website. Learning from Failure, if you'd like to learn more about this.