There is a brilliant book by John Gall called "Systemantics: How Systems Really Work and How They Fail"

On the surface it looks like an elaborate Murphy's Law joke, but after a long engineering career I still consider it the most important book on engineering I have ever read.

From https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Systemantics

"General Systemantics (retitled to Systemantics in its second edition and The Systems Bible in its third) is a systems engineering treatise by John Gall in which he offers practical principles of systems design based on experience and anecdotes.

It is offered from the perspective of how not to design systems, based on system engineering failures. The primary precept of the treatise is that large complex systems are extremely difficult to design correctly despite best intentions and so care must be taken to design smaller less complex systems and to do so with incremental functionality based on close and continual touch with user needs and measures of effectiveness."

" The term systemantics is a commentary on prior work by Alfred Korzybski called General Semantics which conjectured that all systems failures could be attributed to a single root cause—a failure to communicate. Dr. Gall observes that, instead, system failure is an intrinsic feature of systems. He thereby derives the term 'General Systemantics' in deference to the notion of a sweeping theory of system failure, but attributed to an intrinsic feature based on laws of system behavior. He observes as a side-note that system antics also playfully captures the concept that systems naturally "act up."

There is a brilliant book by John Gall called "Systemantics: How Systems Really Work and How They Fail"

On the surface it looks like an elaborate Murphy's Law joke, but after a long engineering career I still consider it the most important book on engineering I have ever read.

From https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Systemantics

"General Systemantics (retitled to Systemantics in its second edition and The Systems Bible in its third) is a systems engineering treatise by John Gall in which he offers practical principles of systems design based on experience and anecdotes.

It is offered from the perspective of how not to design systems, based on system engineering failures. The primary precept of the treatise is that large complex systems are extremely difficult to design correctly despite best intentions and so care must be taken to design smaller less complex systems and to do so with incremental functionality based on close and continual touch with user needs and measures of effectiveness."

" The term systemantics is a commentary on prior work by Alfred Korzybski called General Semantics which conjectured that all systems failures could be attributed to a single root cause—a failure to communicate. Dr. Gall observes that, instead, system failure is an intrinsic feature of systems. He thereby derives the term 'General Systemantics' in deference to the notion of a sweeping theory of system failure, but attributed to an intrinsic feature based on laws of system behavior. He observes as a side-note that system antics also playfully captures the concept that systems naturally "act up."

Maybe this can help you : http://www.scielo.org.za/pdf/hts/v73n4/36.pdf

http://sticef.univ-lemans.fr/num/vol2014/19-peraya-epa/sticef_2014_NS_peraya_19p.pdf

Dear Pekka Mertala

I agree with Ulrich Hugel .

Best regards

Hello Pekka Mertala ,

Have you considered the failure of the Theranos company's mini-lab system? This mini-lab was supposed to be able to run hundreds of medical diagnostic tests using a finger stick amount of blood instead of the traditional tube(s) of venous blood drawn by a phlebotomist. These systems, which were tabletop devices networked to a central server or network of servers, were slated to be deployed in Walgreen pharmacies all over the US. This approach would have revolutionized medical diagnostic testing. No longer would the patient have go to a phlebotomist to have blood drawn and then the blood sample sent to a central laboratory from which the test results would be transmitted to the patient's doctor. Everything would be done at one location using a tiny amount of blood and the results would be ready in about 15 minutes.

Elizabeth Holmes, the founder of Theranos, had the idea for the mini-lab in college and dropped out of school to found the company. The idea of the mini-lab was so seductive that she eventually was able to raise billions of dollars in private equity. There is a book about this failed effort entitled "Bad Blood" and a HBO documentary "The Inventor: Out for Blood in Silicon Valley".

Here the failure was not just the mini-lab system but the whole company, its associated research and design effort, and especially its management. A total system failure that even a jaded novelist could not imagine.

[1] John Carreyrou; Bad Blood; Alfred A. Knopf; 2018; 342 pp.

Regards,

Tom Cuff

Hello Pekka Mertala

You already probably know about these books that discuss system failure, but just in case you don't, here they are:

[1] Mike Gray, Ira Rosen; The Warning, Accident at Three Mile Island; Contemporary Books, In.c; 1982.

[2] Charles Perrow; Normal Accidents, Living with High-Risk Technologies; Basic Books; 1984.

[3] Victor Bignell, Joyce Fortune; Understanding System Failures; Manchester University Books; 1984.

[4] David Bellin, Gary Chapman (editors); Computers in Battle, Will They Work?; Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, Publishers; 1987.

[5] Leonard Lee; The Day the Phones Stopped; Donald I. Fine, Inc.; 1991

[6] Ivars Peterson; Fatal Defects, Chasing Computer Bugs; Times Books; 1995.

[7] Gregory J. E. Rawlins; Moths to the Flame, The Seductions of Computer Technology; A Bradford Book,The MIT Press; 1996.

[8] Robert L. Glass; Computing Calamities, Lessons Learned from Products, Projects, and Companies that Failed; Prentice Hall PTR; 1999.

[9] James R. Chiles; Inviting Disaster, Lessons from the Edge of Technology; 2001.

Regards,

Tom Cuff

Nice Contribution Thomas Cuff

Hello Pekka Mertala and Abdelkader Mohamed Elsayed ,

Thank you, Abdelkader, for your kind words. I forgot to mention the following books, which all treat nuclear accidents:

[1] William McKeown; Idaho Falls, The Untold Story of America's First Nuclear Accident; ECW Press; 2003.

[2] Eric Schlosser; Command and Control, Nuclear Weapons, the Damascus Accident, and the Illusion of Safety; The Penguin Press; 2013.

[3] James Mahaffey; Atomic Accidents, A History of Nuclear Meltdowns and Disasters, From the Ozark Mountains to Fukushima; Pegasus Books; 2014.

Regards,

Tom Cuff