Weighing Input

The person with the most knowledge on a topic should be given more weight.

Space Shuttle Challenger Incident

The challenger was the last space shuttle flight that exploded during launch at Cape Caneveral Florida with the first civilian, a School teacher. This was the 25th Space Shuttle Mission. A lot of people were watching.

Engineers had concerns about O-ring reduced performance and believed that cold weather would make it worst.

However, their data regarding temperature and O-ring performance was inconclusive.

Recommendation was to not launch if the temperature was below 53 degrees farehinhight.

Manager asked annoyingly “when do you want me to launch this? next Spring? (a few months away since it was just turning fall).

They looked at the evidence and rather than traditionally trying to prove that things were safe, they were trying to prove that things will fail which they could not do with inconclusive evidence.

From an engineering managers perspective, the recommendation is to not launch.

Asked to put on his Managers hat only, the recommendation was that it was okay to launch. This is because of deadlines and meeting budgets.

Reference: Challenger: The Final Flight a Documentation Series on Netflix

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