It seems to me that it is very clear that there are multiple problems, that the information necessary to identify the underlying causes is not available to the general public, and that Boeing, partners, and USG are working on getting this resolved. It seems interesting but not particularly useful to speculate.
An interesting but useful line of questioning would be to look into industries we know and our past companies for what happened and what lessons can be learned in places where we have more complete information.
That said, the topic at hand :)
One question is whether the battery failures represent an unacceptable safety risk. Without knowing anything about the technical specifics you can figure the answer is yes: Boeing is the home town team and the FAA has every political interest in keeping Boeing planes in the air. Still, their overriding concern is safety and they've grounded the 787 in what must have been an unpleasant choice but one viewed as necessary.
Another question is whether there is a management failure at Boeing. Management is ultimately responsible for outcomes so whether this incident is out of line with the industry norm is one reasonable way to answer that question. In this case looking at data on whether grounding of a new model is unusual would be reasonable. NTSB or FAA probably have this in a report somewhere, my guess is it's rare (the only other similar thing I can think of is the A380 wing cracks). So my guess is yes, by a reasonable standard there was a management failure.
Those two things seem obvious and not particularly interesting to discuss. Some things that are not obvious:
What's wrong with the batteries? robomartin's list of potential causes is long and educational but (as he points out) incomplete. This is an interesting problem for which we don't have enough information to reach any kind of strong conclusion. Some really smart people who are also domain experts and who have all of the data will sort this one out. Best read the news, at some point there will be a weighty public report detailing exactly what went wrong.
What's wrong with Boeing? I'm sure this will be studied for decades to come, I don't know and I'm pretty sure the author doesn't know. The idea that markets start out favoring highly integrated designs and trend towards standardization and modularity is well accepted and probably correct but at this point he's just fitting recent events into that framework rather than finding ways to test that hypothesis.
I couldn't agree more with your post and your approach to discussing the problem. Yes, unless we are talking about something like and attempt to sabotage or worst, terrorism --both of which I would like to believe are highly unlikely-- ultimately management and engineering have to look back and see where the process dropped the ball. We are only human. We make mistakes. As you said, actual data will bubble-up to the surface eventually. From an engineering standpoint (and as a passenger!!!) I'd love to understand what happened.
A while ago I enjoyed reading "The Machine That Changed the World":
It was interesting to learn about the evolution of manufacturing and management practices that made a huge impact on the automobile industry. Lots of lessons from that book can be applied well outside that industry.
Thanks, that looks like a great recommendation. I spent some time at IMVU (online service + software) a few years back and their processes were heavily inspired by the Toyota Production System. The stuff they adopted seemed to work really well so lean manufacturing has been interesting to me since.
An interesting but useful line of questioning would be to look into industries we know and our past companies for what happened and what lessons can be learned in places where we have more complete information.
That said, the topic at hand :)
One question is whether the battery failures represent an unacceptable safety risk. Without knowing anything about the technical specifics you can figure the answer is yes: Boeing is the home town team and the FAA has every political interest in keeping Boeing planes in the air. Still, their overriding concern is safety and they've grounded the 787 in what must have been an unpleasant choice but one viewed as necessary.
Another question is whether there is a management failure at Boeing. Management is ultimately responsible for outcomes so whether this incident is out of line with the industry norm is one reasonable way to answer that question. In this case looking at data on whether grounding of a new model is unusual would be reasonable. NTSB or FAA probably have this in a report somewhere, my guess is it's rare (the only other similar thing I can think of is the A380 wing cracks). So my guess is yes, by a reasonable standard there was a management failure.
Those two things seem obvious and not particularly interesting to discuss. Some things that are not obvious:
What's wrong with the batteries? robomartin's list of potential causes is long and educational but (as he points out) incomplete. This is an interesting problem for which we don't have enough information to reach any kind of strong conclusion. Some really smart people who are also domain experts and who have all of the data will sort this one out. Best read the news, at some point there will be a weighty public report detailing exactly what went wrong.
What's wrong with Boeing? I'm sure this will be studied for decades to come, I don't know and I'm pretty sure the author doesn't know. The idea that markets start out favoring highly integrated designs and trend towards standardization and modularity is well accepted and probably correct but at this point he's just fitting recent events into that framework rather than finding ways to test that hypothesis.
Whatever.