Exhibit 1203 ยท Book chapter (peer-reviewed volume)
System effects: on slippery slopes, repeating negative patterns, and learning from mistake?
By structural secrecy, I mean the way that organization structure and information dependence obscured problem seriousness from people responsible for oversight.
Vaughan restates her Challenger findings through the CAIB analysis. Defines normalization of deviance as decisions that made sense to the people making them in context, and structural secrecy as the way structure and information dependence hide problem seriousness from oversight, in place of individual concealment.
- Source
- Diane Vaughan, in W. Starbuck and M. Farjoun (eds.), Organization at the Limit: Lessons from the Columbia Disaster (Blackwell)
- Date
- 2005
- Quoted from
- p. 43 (printed chapter page)
- Grade
- Peer-reviewed
- Document
- https://raghavan.usc.edu/2020-fall-computing-and-global-change/vaughan.pdf
- Accessed
- 2026-11-10
- Cited by
- Findings citing this exhibit
- Note
- Open PDF copy hosted on a USC course site. The same page says: "Individual secrecy - the classic explanation of individuals trying to keep bad news from top management - does not work here." The 1996 book The Challenger Launch Decision itself was not accessible as text; this chapter and the CAIB are the readable statements of the concepts.