Read the section in "Outliers" about airplane crashes

by Dylan, Monday, April 18, 2011, 10:39 (5547 days ago) @ Jay

It's really fascinating, because it's the very nature of such accidents that the blame is diffuse. Nearly every air disaster has had multiple points of failure, any one of which, if properly corrected, would have prevented the crash. It takes a whole suite of screw-ups to make a plane fall out of the sky, and the majority of them come from simple miscommunication.

Gladwell talks about why Korean Air had the worst safety record of all the airlines. It had to do with institutional/cultural power relationships in the cockpit. Captains would screw something up, and the others would just go along with it, even though they knew they and every one aboard would be killed. Their record improved after they identified the problem and trained the crews to behave as equals.

The bottom line is that unequal power relationships can make people behave totally irrationally. I don't doubt that there is a similar dynamic in college football programs.