The Challenger Shuttle Disaster. Culture is not rocket science, its more complex than that.

40 years ago today, on the 28^th January 1986, at 11:39:13 a.m. EST the space shuttle Challenger disintegrated 73 seconds into its launch.

The seven crew members aboard were killed, and the disaster led to a 32 month halt in the Space Shuttle program.

The painful details are now well known.

The proximate cause of the catastrophe was the failure of O-ring seals in a solid rocket booster. Freezing temperatures on the morning of the launch had stiffened the rubber O-rings, reducing their ability to close the joints.

Hot pressurized gas from within the solid rocket leaked through the joint, burned through critical struts, and traveling at Mach 1.92 the orbiter was torn apart.

The investigation commission heavily criticized NASA's organizational culture & decision-making processes as being central to the accident. The potentially catastrophic flaw in the O-rings was known, particularly when launching in low temperatures.

Even on the night before the launch a, conference call was held between the maker of the solid rocket boosters (Morton Thiokol) and NASA. Despite Morton Thiokol engineers expressing concern over the effect of record cold temperatures on the O-rings, Challenger was cleared to go.

Scheduling and commercial pressures, siloed thinking, reduced psychological safety, normalization of deviance & the favouring of consensus over dissent; all mixed together to fatal effect. The ultimate cause of the disaster was in the complex soup of human behaviour and decision making.

They swore never again.

Yet 17 years later the Space Shuttle Columbia disintegrated during re-entry, killing all seven crew members on board.

The proximate cause was foam from the external tank striking the orbiter's left wing during launch.

The ultimate cause was cultural.

And are Bank’s better than NASA at assessing and understanding the critical behavioural drivers of resilience and risk?

Are the GFC industry lessons of 17 years ago now addressed?

Has an over-reliance on the technical & the process driven been supplemented with a deeper understanding of the people and organisation dynamics?

If AI is a new rocket fuel, is it counterbalanced with a deep insight and expertise into the human?

Or is the same complacency present?

(I have recently finished reading “Challenger - A True Story of Heroism and Disaster on the Edge of Space”, by Adam Higginbotham. If you enjoyed his previous book “Midnight in Chernobyl” you will be riveted by his retelling of the Space Shuttle disaster.)