12 Comments

Reminds me of physics lesson “strength of chain is strength of weakest link”

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Definitely! I could also see this being applied multiple disciplines, like construction.

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Reminded me of the concept of "triple safe" for aircraft, system be able to withstand 3 time more stress than expected and critical ones should have triple redundancy!

Of course as you explained, even with that there can be series of failure (usually involving human error) that lead to catastrophic outcomes...

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Yeah, margin of safety is used in aviation and quite a bit in construction as well.

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When I was a wedding planner I witnessed this a ton. I typically swooped over head putting out small fires here and there to keep the day going. I saw my self as a line of defense against catastrophe. But I like your analogy of the Swiss cheese effect.

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Thank you! Sounds incredible. I recently got married and thought wedding planning was such a tough job— so many fires and the whole day comes with so many expectations from the planners. One accident and things go south, really fast!

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We use this model in medicine too. There are many checks in place to make sure silly mistakes don’t happen.

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Yep, while researching for the article, I saw it was widely used in the field of medicine, aviation, and engineering/manufacturing.

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this was so well written - the Swiss cheese theory helped me solve so many pending threads in my head. Thank you for writing this Tapan!

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Thank you so much, Abhishek!

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Really well written, researched and illustrated Tapan.

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Thank you, Mark!

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