What Disasters Can Teach Us About Good System Design

Using Chernobyl (1986), the Challenger explosion, India's catastrophic second Covid wave, and even failed marketing strategies, Chakraborty argues that the "root cause" of a disaster — the O-ring, the Soviet bureaucracy, the lack of healthcare — is almost never the main cause. Real disasters are emergent failures of layered systems where many small, separately tolerable things go wrong together. Good system design therefore isn't about fixing the most visible failure point; it's about engineering the layered redundancy that makes single failures recoverable.