Several years ago, I began to ask why systems break, what makes them brittle, and how we might better build and operate them. This line of inquiry lead me down a deep rabbit hole comprising multiple fields of research, seminars in Sweden and NYC, invited talks at multiple conferences, and many, many PDFs.

This book is the introduction of roughly 3 years of notes on the subjects of complexity, decision making under uncertainty, risk taking, learning from failure, human factors, and system safety. It is an outgrowth of my desire to understand why things fail, and why so many of our efforts to prevent failure also fail. I don’t want to keep making the same mistakes over again, I want to learn from them.

Don’t you?