Monday, November 4, 2013

What can we learn from "Disaster Lit"?

Interesting interview over at HBR.org of author Neil Swidey, about his upcoming book, Trapped Under the Sea: One Engineering Marvel, Five Men, and a Disaster Ten Miles Into the Darkness, about a diving disaster in Boston Harbor in the 1990s. In the interview, Swidey's book is lumped into a genre called "disaster lit" including books like Into Thin Air and The Perfect Storm. Interestingly, Swidey points out Krakauer's assertion in Into Thin Air that "The urge to catalogue the myriad blunders in order to ‘learn from the mistakes’ is for the most part an exercise in denial and self-deception."

And while that may seem to be an indictment of this site, I tend to agree with Krakauer's assertion - if you are talking about disasters that occur when attempting to climb Mount Everest. His theme is that amateurs have no place climbing Everest, because of the inherent, uncontrollable risk the mountain and environment offer. The risk in climbing Everest is not an issue of inadequate human design - Everest is simply more powerful than your plan. Trying to insure against disaster by studying other's mistakes causes you to take a much larger risk - underestimating the mountain and the power of randomness.

We can learn from many classes of mistakes and disasters, when we make the same mistake over and over again, when we ignore "near misses," when we lack a clear objective. But not all.

I would agree that there's little to learn from the Everest disasters that can help you avoid future ones, if you are inclined to challenge that mountain. If the mountain wants to take you, it will.

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