A banger YT presentation from the late, great Richard Cook. He discusses ‘how complex systems fail’.
Video link below.
Some extracts:
· “The surprise is not that there are so many accidents … The surprise is that there are so few”
· “The normal world is not well-behaved … Even so, a lot of operational settings achieve success”
· “I’m going to talk about how complex systems don’t fail … it’s something that we don’t look at very often”
· “But we’re pretty attuned to failure but we don’t look at success very frequently at least in an operational setting”
· “Those of you who work in operations know that nobody ever calls you up on the phone at 3:00am in the morning to say that the system is running well and they’re very happy with things”
· “things that you haven’t seen before actually do occur relatively frequently … there’s lots of adapting and tailoring that is systems are not sort of working out of the Box … they have to be tweaked and tuned and coddled and stroked and kissed and prayed to and you have to burn the right kind of incense in order to get your systems to run there’s a lot of tailoring that goes on where people twist and turn and and shave off here and turn on and turn off various kinds of services and start and stop other kinds of things and set parameters to try and make the thing go”
· Two key terms are “systems as imagined versus systems as found”
· “Most systems are imagined … few people have much contact with the system as found”
· “Systems as imagined are state diagrams and their layouts of rack panels and their floor diagrams and all sorts of things …it’s the way we make stuff and they’re static and deterministic”
· “These systems as found are dynamic and stochastic they are not deterministic … they are entirely stochastic their performance cannot be deterministically defined”
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