Lessons to be Learned from Engineering Failures

In Engineering, we shouldn't have a culture of trying to hide our mistakes. However, there are various reasons engineers may hide their mistakes, ranging from professional and personal pride through to a fear of exposing ourselves to liability. Unfortunately, doing so doesn’t provide learning opportunities for others. Engineering NZ and their technical groups collaborated to bring to life the common causes of mistakes across the different disciplines. They have done this by exploring case-studies of large mistakes as well as examples of smaller, common errors.

Often we are looking for the human factors as well as the technical details of failures and mistakes so we can learn lessons. In most cases, human error in one form or another was the root of the problem in most cases. The most common issues were poor communication between parties, constraints around resources (time/money), incomplete understanding of the issues being solved, and ethical issues.

In the first of a series of Engineering NZ webinars, Glen Koorey with structural engineer Gordon Hughes introduced the concept of how we as engineers often need to learn lessons from previous engineering failures to use for future projects. Glen and Gordon discussed some key points on learning from failures: What is failure? Why should we investigate failures? Why did these mistakes occur? Also touching on the aspects of failure with in-depth breakdowns and examples and much more.

The webinar presentation is here and you can also watch the video.