RubyConf 2021 - Taking the 737 to the Max by Nickolas Means

Taking the 737 to the Max by Nickolas Means

Ten years ago, Boeing faced a difficult choice. The Airbus A320neo was racking up orders faster than any plane in history because of its fuel efficiency improvements, and Boeing needed to compete. Should they design a new plane from scratch or just update the tried-and-true 737 with new engines?

The 737 MAX entered service seven years later as the result of that and hundreds of other choices along the way. Let’s look at some of those choices in context to understand how the 737 MAX went so very wrong. We’ll learn a thing or two along the way about making better decisions ourselves and as teams.

[atlidagur]

What a gem of a channel!! Nicolas Means has the absolute best talks and I've found so few till now. I appreciate this so much! ❤️❤️

[martinmacphee]

Excellent talk - and while the story of the Max was to be illustrative, I think one important thing was left out in order to paint a rosy picture of the outcome. Yes, as said, eventually the time lost to post-accident investigation and re-design/certification was longer than it would have taken to do it correctly the first time.

However, from the perspective of bean-counters in Boeing leadership, this is NOT the business lesson they will take away.

They will tell each other that if they had taken the extra time, they wouldn't have gotten the order from American, and the subsequent orders that would have followed such a big order from a prestige customer. All those parked 737 Max? Each has since been delivered and an almighty cha-CHING went to Boeing and to their salespeople.

Also, leadership has escaped any responsibility, because after all, they are just MBAs - they had no idea their business decisions could cost lives, and besides, here's a non-business man (aka Chief Pilot) we can feed to the press and the Regulators as the one who was supposed to prevent that from happening.

To use one of your previous forms of accident analysis on the full outcome:

First Story: The Chief Pilot didn't do his job of keeping people safe, while the business people did their jobs of keeping the company's stock price up.

Second Story: Decisions regarding the engineering of essential safety systems should not be made by businessmen, but by engineers

Third story: Unaccountable business leadership is corrosive to engineering safe products. A lack of accountability for doing so makes unsafe products and the loss of life inevitable.

Love your talks - keep them coming please!

[mikeletaurus]

Mr. Means is a superb presenter, and his presentations are widely applicable to almost any field of endeavor. I would like to hear him discuss the correlation between humility and courage as it pertains to effective leadership.

[Judesmood]

Ooh! A new Nick Means talk! I’ve been waiting for another one of his incredible narrations to come out :)

[dennisrkb]

Making a control system act purely on the input of a single sensor, not putting any limits on its actions, and disabling manual overwrite - wow.

[JanBruunAndersen]

Any Boeing experts around? What would happen if one of the pilots clamped down on the trim wheels and stopped MCAS from spinning them forward?

[Zirlikus]

I love it when Nicolas Means talks. However, i think it's in poor taste to take a good spin on this story. A lot of people died for corporate greed, and there were nearly no consequeces. If we really want to stop these practices CEO's should be accountable for the shit they cause.

[DrzewieckiDesign]

Sometimes it seems like loss of life is just a disadvantage a company needs to account for. Planes (and other products) might kill people as long as this is commercially viable, and for the Max it actually might still have been viable as Boeing sold tons of Maxes.

We are told that human life is the top thing to protect but this is definitely not at all how the real world works. Same with wars - terrain and resources are the most important, human life is much less valuable. So the whole SAFETY parameter in certain cases is only a variable of a profit.

[Matt_the_Forger]

I do really enjoy his presentations but on this subject I agree that it lets the leadership of Boeing off the hook too easily. CEOs who make decisions like these should see prison time in a just culture…. it should not be career-survivable to make such a call then that risk will not so easily be taken

[TheTransporter]

Sounds like Stonecipher needs to go to a hard labor prison.

[DrewNorthup]

I'm not going to critique that book without having read it, but this analysis fails both to understand systems as well as classic root cause analysis.
I cannot give this a thumbs-up.

[qbi]

Nicolas Means should stick to motivational speaking on subjects he has actual knowledge. He has little real understanding of the "hierarchy of control"