The Boeing 737's low-to-the-ground requirement from the 1960s helped lead, sixty years later, to two crashes and 346 deaths. Not because the design was wrong, but because the requirements changed and a chain of patches grew unchecked. The same thing happens to founders and senior leaders: the original misalignment is rarely what breaks you, the unexamined patches stacked on top of it are.
8 min readThe failure that gets you is almost never the dramatic one. It is the small drift that went fine for years, until the day it did not. An aerospace engineer and cave diver on the normalization of deviance, for founders and senior leaders, and the skill of noticing the quiet erosion early.
The only rocket with a zero percent chance of failure is the one that never leaves the pad, and that one has already failed. For founders and senior leaders sitting on a decision that will not move: how to tell the safe choice that protects something real from the one that just keeps you on the ground because flying is uncomfortable.
Automation is the fifth and last step of an engineering framework for living, and the one most people reach for first. The moment you automate something, you marry it: you commit to maintaining it forever. Automating a bad process does not fix it, it cements it. When to build, when to question the requirement instead, and why the last step points back to the first.
Fail-safe engineering does not try to build something that never fails. It makes sure that when a part fails, it fails into a safe state. An aerospace engineer turned coach on why the most important thing he does has almost nothing to do with the questions he asks: building a space safe enough for the true thing to be said out loud.
A rocket engine line that builds four hundred engines a year has fewer defects per engine than one that builds twenty. High cadence forces quality. The fourth step of an engineering framework for living: speed up the cycle, and run a five-minute weekly retrospective so you find problems while they are still small.
We are always trying to make life more efficient, and that is the problem. Simplification is the third step of an engineering framework for living. Not minimalism, not optimization. It is finding the interfaces in your week and folding two things into one.
I wrote my diploma thesis at NASA, did a PhD in Tokyo, applied to be an astronaut. Then an astronaut on a private tour showed me the search has no finish line. It only upgrades. What the search cost me, and what finally answered the question it was asking.
SpaceX's newest rocket engine is missing a heat shield, a fire suppression system, and most of its external plumbing. The engineers there have a phrase for this approach. It might be one of the most important things I have ever read about how to live.
A toddler falls down hundreds of times before walking. Adults trying something hard get a much emptier room. Here, for the record, is a partial list of the times I fell down, and what I notice now from this side of it.
Burnout is not a personal weakness. It is what happens when a real human spec sheet is run inside a system whose requirements do not match. An engineer's view on what actually breaks, and why fixing the human is the wrong fix.
I sat on a call with ten coaches. They could read their bodies in 4K. I had two channels. Here's what happened when I started taking emotional data seriously.
NASA's newest moon rocket flies with engines from 1982 because Congress mandated heritage hardware. Most of us build our lives the same way, around parts we never picked.
I spent ten years getting really good at the wrong things. Then I learned something from Elon Musk's five-step algorithm for building rockets. It also works for building a life.