Communication failures contributing to the Challenger accident: an example for technical communicators

Abstract

Examination of the public documents available on the Challenger explosion shows that a history of miscommunication con- tributed to the accident. This miscommunication was caused by sev- eral factors, including managers and engineers interpreting data from different perspectives and the difficulty of believing and then sending had news, especially to superiors or outsiders. An understanding of the dynamics at work in the Challenger case can help engineers and engineering managers elsewhere reduce miscommunication in their own companies. TECHNOLOGICAL FAILURE such as the explosion the space shuttle Challenger can be puzzling in ret- rospect. Investigation often reveals that various people in the organization involved knew that the failure was likely and knew how to prevent it, and yet that knowledge was not shared within the organization as a whole. How does it happen that such important knowledge is not communi- cated? In the case of the Challenger, why did those who knew of the problem with the shuttle's solid rocket boosters not convince those in power to stop the launch? The answer to this question lies in a complex set of fac- tors, the most important of which seem to be (I) managers and engineers viewing the same facts from different per- spectives, and (2) the general difficulty of either sending or receiving bad news, particularly when it must be passed to superiors or outsiders. An analysis of the communica- tion failures that contributed to the Challenger accident is potentially of great interest to engineers and their managers because a large part of an engineer's job is to communicate both good and bad news upward to management for deci- sion-making. The Challenger explosion was a horrifying public event, but it resulted from factors that are probably at work more quietly in many other organizations.