Communication · Executive Insight Brief · 368
When failure moves faster than diagnosis
Perrow links catastrophic risk to interactive complexity and tight coupling, shifting attention from the last error to the architecture that makes surprise hard to contain
Premise
Some failures emerge from combinations that no operator or designer fully anticipated. Normal Accident Theory argues that in interactively complex, tightly coupled systems, multiple components can combine unexpectedly while time, slack, and alternative paths disappear. “Normal” means structurally possible within the system, not frequent, acceptable, or inevitable in every case.
For executives, this changes the diagnosis of operational failure. More training or more communication cannot guarantee control when signals are ambiguous, teams hold valid but partial models, and local actions propagate before a shared causal picture can be assembled. System architecture becomes part of the communication problem.
What the model is: Normal Accident Theory in Knowledge →
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- Why this matters
- Risks and limits
- Executive takeaway
- Key questions
- Selected sources
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- FamilyModel
- CategoryTheories & Explanatory Models
- DomainRisk, Crisis & Safety
What these mean
Editorial orientation · Family
Model
In this series, Model names the editorial family primarily used to understand and explain communication: theories, frameworks, effects, traditions, principles and other conceptual resources. It is an umbrella for a route into the field, not a claim that every included object is a predictive model.
Editorial orientation · Category
Theories & Explanatory Models
Explains how or why a communication process works by relating mechanisms, conditions or variables. Its value is an account that can guide inquiry into what produces an outcome, rather than a name for the outcome alone.
- KnowledgeNormal Accident Theory