The Field Guide › Paper
A NASA Safety and Mission Assurance briefing applying Diane Vaughan's normalisation of deviance concept alongside Janis's groupthink to a series of high-profile failures: Shuttle O-ring waivers, external tank foam strikes, the Costa Concordia grounding, and ISS EVA-23. Makes the connection between organisational silence and catastrophic outcome with institutional directness unusual in safety communications. Useful as a practitioner-facing synthesis of academic concepts applied to real incidents, and as evidence that the highest-stakes organisations take the cost of silence seriously as a systemic — not individual — problem.