The new normal:
An Engineering Theory of the Volkswagen Scandal
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In a powerful book about the disintegration, immediately after launch, of the Challenger space shuttle, which killed seven astronauts in January of 1986, the sociologist Diane Vaughan described a phenomenon inside engineering organizations that she called the “normalization of deviance.” In such cultures, she argued, there can be a tendency to slowly and progressively create rationales that justify ever-riskier behaviors. Starting in 1983, the Challenger shuttle had been through nine successful launches, in progressively lower ambient temperatures, across the years. Each time the launch team got away with a lower-temperature launch, Vaughan argued, engineers noted the deviance, then decided it wasn’t sufficiently different from what they had done before to constitute a problem. They effectively declared the mildly abnormal normal, making deviant behavior acceptable, right up until the moment when, after the shuttle launched on a particularly cold Florida morning in 1986, its O-rings failed catastrophically and the ship broke apart.
We are, by now, used to seeing greed as the primary driver of corporate scandals. In the wake of Enron and the mortgage fraud that led to the financial crisis, the great surprise of the Volkswagen scandal may prove to be that the malfeasance could have arisen systemically, without the direct involvement of anyone higher up (or the involvement of mortgage traders, for that matter). It is still possible, of course, that we will learn that the engineers were under orders from management to beat the tests by any means necessary, but based on what we now know, that seems implausible. It’s more likely that the scandal is the product of an engineering organization that evolved its technologies in a way that subtly and stealthily, even organically, subverted the rules. Volkswagen is promising to release a fix for its software soon; fixing its entire operation may leave it wishing it could merely fire a few mortgage traders.
My theory is that the engineers' managers optimistically committed to meet specs and dates which, early on, seemed aggressive but achievable. This is pretty typical for engineering projects, especially projects with super smart guys who are not in the habit of thinking a lot about what can go wrong. A year or so away from the start manufacture date, it becomes clear that emission specs can't be met without compromising fuel efficiency and performance and something has to give: emissions or fuel efficiency or performance or target dates. The managers probably had a meeting and someone suggested a temporary software solution (no doubt described as trivial to implement and switch off later) to buy the hardware guys another year or so and someone, probably the hardware project manager, under tremendous pressure, caved. You can't blame this on engineers. That's the fastest way to destroy an organization. Every manager worth his or her salt knows this.
If you lose all hope, you can always find it again -- Richard Ford in The Sportswriter
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shyams, on 2015-September-20, 11:09, said:
