Normalizaton Of Deviance

My blog today is mostly thoughts from my viewing the movie, “Deepwater Horizon”.  I have taken excerpts from an article, from Slate, BP is to blame for Deepwater Horizon, and my comments.

Below:

About 40 minutes into the new movie Deepwater Horizon, there is a scene in which crew member Jimmy Harrell is suddenly called into the dining area on the floating drilling platform of the same name. “Mr. Jimmy,” played by Kurt Russell, was the offshore installation manager (essentially the crew boss) on the vessel, and he’d been summoned to receive a special award for the rig’s excellent safety record. Like most of the scenes in the movie, this one is closely based on actual events the night of April 20, 2010, when the actual Deepwater Horizon was destroyed by an uncontrolled eruption of oil and gas. The explosion killed 11 crew members and set off the worst oil spill in U.S. history.

Continued...

The Dutch pilot-psychologist Sidney Dekker, one of the pioneers in studying large technological breakdowns, has written that the true cause of most disasters is not so much the initial accident “but the failure to identify the accident early in its birth.” The blowout of BP’s Macondo Prospect well was a case study in how a series of small mistakes and miscalulations.

The reality is that both BP and Transocean had grown dangerously overconfident and were pushing too close to the edge (mistakes were snowballing for catasphropic disaster).

Similarly...

And there is. After the loss of the space shuttle Challenger in 1986, sociologist Diane Vaughan began a long investigation into the accident. Her findings would challenge many of our easy assumptions about how disasters occur. We like to think that accidents happen because bad people knowingly and carelessly let them happen. Vaughan discovered something more troubling: that even organizations staffed by smart, seemingly moral people can slowly slide into dangerous and unethical behavior.

“Managers were, in fact, quite moral and rule abiding as they calculated risk,” she writes. And yet they were flat wrong. “Following rules, doing their jobs,” she concludes, “they made a disastrous decision.” The managers weren’t “amoral calculators,” Vaughan says. Instead, they were fundamentally deluded about the risks posed by the leaky boosters. What’s more, over the years they had systematically deluded themselves, through a process she calls the “normalization of deviance.”

Musings...

Do we sometimes fall into spiritual “normalization of deviance” regarding our own, real life, serious daily, living calculations?  The Nephites certainly fell into this trap- those “gadiantons” in their society who influenced, slowly their liberty and morality, even getting the righteous into their deluded “amoral calculators”. Are we personally falling into these traps, or do we not rotate through the known nephite cycle from pride to repentence, yet remaining or comforted by personal or secular pride?

Heleman 10:1..."insomuch that they divided hither and thither and went their ways". Have hope to stand with Nephi, who the people left alone at that time, because of their "thithering" ways.