Grumpy Old Man #3: Hubris kills

My previous Grumpy Old Man posts have talked a lot about risk management, rule followers vs. rule breakers, and having a good sense of what kinds/how much risk you are taking on.

Unfortunately, I was recently and starkly reminded of this when an "innovator" killed himself and four other people because he felt that the rules of good engineering were stifling innovation so he chose not to be bound by them. Yes, I'm talking about the OceanGate Titan submarine implosion.

Full disclosure: I was a submarine officer in the US Navy. I've spent days and months submerged inside a pressure vessel that was thoroughly designed, rigorously tested, and fanatically maintained. I trusted my life to that pressure vessel because of that.

While we will have to wait for the formal engineering analysis from the relevant government agencies, all of the reporting indicates that the founder actively rejected input on the design safety and purposely circumvented any oversight of what he was doing. He felt that he was smarter than the rules, many of which were literally written in the blood of submariners past. There's only one word to describe this, hubris. He and four of his "shipmates" died of hubris.

Yes I'm angry about this if you can't tell. But I think this reinforces some of the topics I've discussed before. I see many smart, eager people spending time trying to "beat the system" rather than focusing on rigorous execution. Here's a hint, if you're hiding stuff from your partners or your lenders, you're trying to beat the system. If you're ignoring lots of people saying "this is a very bad idea," you're setting yourself up for a "rapid unscheduled disassembly" in SpaceX speak. Don't do that.

There is room in the world for innovation, even for stretching the art of what's possible, but you do that in a way that recognizes and manages the associated risk rather than ignoring it. Go watch a test pilot at work. They don't just strap on and launch, they spend vast amounts of time understanding and mitigating the risk of the boundary pushing before they ever strap in.

Ignore that lesson at your peril