p.67 The most pernicious constraint ever laid on a public organization is the doctrine of efficiency, a percept that appears so self-evident and so much a matter of common-sense, as to be beyond doubt... If we must wager our future on a set of norms, we are more likely to benefit from those associated with effectiveness and reliability; norms which, by their nature, must consider criteria of correctness... reliability is based on the realistic assumption of fallibility.

p.68 Luttwack concludes, there is an obvious contradiction between efficiency criteria and military effectiveness. Efficiency requires homogeneity, commonality, standardization. But effectiveness demands diversity, duplication and overlap and a wide and varied response repertoire (Landau, 1969). In Ashby's terms, the Law of Requisite Variety yields to economies of scale and combat effectiveness is displaced... It is... always so much more simple and less costly, to prevent error than to correct it.

p.68 no natural system or process is immune to fault... But nature's constructions are error tolerant, they work through checking systems that serve to reduce the probability of error and to lessen its effect when it occurs... Where norms of effectiveness and reliability replace those of efficiency, organizations become error tolerant and danger lessens.

p.68-69 Ideas, it is well to remember, are no more than anticipations of consequences - forecasts of what will happen when specified operations are undertaken in a stated area (Dewey, 1938: 109). In like manner, decisions lie in the future tense and, therefore, anticipate events and consequences; they are, accordingly, hypotheses... as the time span of a decision or a policy lengthens, its forecasts become ever more uncertain and the probability of error increases. Any structure, or system, or plan, or program, thus, has some time constant beyond which it cannot be trusted. It will, at some predictable time, exhibit fault and make error; it will encounter surprise, anomaly and trouble, some of which may lead to disasters of the first magnitude.

p.69 Optimism restricts anticipation of error, minimizes its probability and leads to the concealment of both its occurrence and the severity of its effects.

p.70 our organizations... must learn to institutionalize disappointment, an action that is as necessary as it is corrective. When we do, we learn well. When we don't, we allow office, politics, status, fear, sanction and dogma to intrude, to dominate and to obscure the simple caveat that wisdom dictates that we work with ideas, policies, programs and decisions that can be invalidated if they are not valid.

p.70 One cannot place enough weight on the proposition that the cardinal element of rational decision-making is not efficiency or optimality, but a system of internal criticism and self-correction. That is called 'institutionalizing disappointment'.

p.70 there is no expertise without a discounting of expectations... Norms of efficiency, and the optimism and success-oriented strategies they conduce, do no assign high priority to the constructive features of error detection and error correction. That knowledge and competence develop only on the basis of error, that the search for truth follows its pathways, does not function as a primary constraint.

p.71 That misplaced optimism is virtually ubiquitous is not news... The design of the common gasoline tanker-truck... they are constructed of the lightest aluminum that can legally be used. One supposes that this is efficient, but what must be added is the striking fact that such tankers have more than five times the crash death rate than other trucks... During the Vietnam War, American soldiers and civilian officials were spurred on by a myopic 'can-doism' - the conviction that they could achieve anything, anywhere... To adopt a negative attitude was defeatism.

p.71 When, however, the threat of error is taken seriously, management attitudes must become pessimistic. Pessimism... we do not live in the worst of all possible worlds. It is, rather, the assignment of high priority to the probability of error, of failure. Its thrust is to reduce such probabilities to insure effective and reliable performance even in the face of trauma. Pessimism moves us to the prevention of error before it occurs: it produces, in operation, a failure-avoidance management strategy.

p.72 if there is no systematic challenge to organizational policies, they easily become dogma. That is why a cogent line of disagreement is as valuable as a reasoned consensus... competitive, objective and competent criticism is the hallmark of a science and of a truly scientific management.

p.73 Despite the fact that Apollo was a crash program, NASA's management strategies in the 1960s were, in the main, pessimistic. The drive to the moon was administered to prevent failure. Fault analysis, parallel development of alternative plans, designs and technologies; independent checks and test; redundant supports for all critical components; all of these and more were standard operating procedures... Central to the design reviews... was a carefully documented program of 'failure-mode and effects analysis'. Engineers would attempt to determine the manner in which things might fail and then assess the effect of such failures upon mission success and crew safety... failure-avoidance... moved NASA, not efficiency.

p.74 NASA's primary concern was to control cost and to keep to budget and to schedule... 'success-oriented management'... What it really meant, as one NASA engineer put it, 'is that you design everything to cost and then pray'.

p.75 nowhere has fault analysis been used as much as in professional American football. Here, managerial pessimism and error-detection and correction systems have been institutionalized more successfully than perhaps anywhere outside of the scientific community. American football... is a game where success depends on the consistent and progressive reduction of error.

p.76-77 What emerges in the examination of football is the constant effort to progressively reduce failure... The football game plan, like the structure of an organization, is a theory of how to accomplish a finite set of goals. It is based on a set of cause and effect assumptions. But in football, these are continuously modified on the basis of experience. Failure (loss) remains its prime concern and strenuous a priori efforts are undertaken to protect against its occurrence.

p.77 managements which are skeptical, resistant to institutional self-deception, which are not easily deceived because they institutionalize disappointment, fare so much better. They cannot help but enlarge their repertoires of response - which is another way of saying that they learn.

p.78 The road to hell, we need to recall, is paved with optimistic intentions.