I’ve been thinking about the Toyota “sudden acceleration” problem. Back in 1984 Charles Perrow published a book entitled “Normal Accidents: Living With High Risk Technologies” (ISBN 0-691-00412-9). Few lay people seem to understand the theory. A system accident is an “unanticipated interaction of multiple failures”[1] in a complex system. This complexity can either be technological or organizational, and often has elements of both. In today’s world, we are seeing complexity increase exponentially: from the cars we drive to the devices we use to listen to music or view video, and to the way we gather information and news, our world has become incredibly complex. That complexity in itself creates more complexity for us.

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