Learning (and improving) the hard way

(Hint: you can click on the cartoon to enlarge it)

Reflection: generally speaking, it's better to be proactive in your approach to finding problems and making improvements

Comments

[Robbie]

This reminds me of how a lot of software is developed. Except now the cycles of catastrophic failures and fixes can be called Agile Development.

[micro CEO]

Perhaps the 1940 Tacoma Narrows bridge in Washington state
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tacoma_Narrows_Bridge_(1940)
was a good example of this...

Well in daily life, I can readily think of an example of the difference between proactive and non-proactive attitude, when driving or riding my bicycle. Proactive means an almost paranoid attitude to what might happen at each approaching intersection or driveway I pass by. Non-proactive is just assuming I can continue on as long as the traffic light turns green and I stay in my lane. Generally no problem here, but then ever so seldomly we get (or cause?) an unpleasant bang!

In his book "Fooled by Randomness", Nassim Taleb discusses the phenomenon of risk in financial markets as something like a game of Russian Roulette. A key problem is that Wall Street tends to reward traders who bring in good results, regardless of the risks taken. Furthermore, since reality rarely tells us how many bullets and how many chambers, it is possible to play for quite a while and become used to the level of risk (lose one's sense of danger) before it actually surprises us with a big disaster...

[Anon]

If this happened during the show time, there would be many "Postmortems."

[From Asia with hope]

As our Big Boss say many times: " We are worldclass in explaining what wrong. We need to be worldclass in preventing what happen."