Why we shouldn’t assume everything is fine with the Boeing 737 Max 10 airliner

OPINION:

Congress has just cleared the Boeing 737 Max 10 jet for certification in the omnibus end-of-year spending bill without further safety enhancements. That’s despite significant opposition by those demanding a safety upgrade: from the union representing the 15,000 pilots at American Airlines; from the families of those killed in two crashes in 2019; and from Peter DeFazio, then the chair of the House Transportation Committee, who led the key congressional investigation of the 737 Max crashes.

This rushed clearance stemmed from the pressure of lobbying by Boeing and its allies. It suggests that neither Boeing nor Congress learned the lesson of Boeing’s earlier 737 Max fiasco, in which 346 people lost their lives; Boeing lost $5 billion in direct revenue and over $25 billion when counting damage to the brand and losing customers, and Boeing fired its CEO, Dennis Muilenburg.

What caused the disaster for Boeing? At a high level, it was the company’s desire to keep up with Airbus’ newer, more fuel-efficient aircraft, the Airbus 320. To do this, Boeing rushed the production of the 737 Max and provided misleading information to the Federal Aviation Administration in order to receive fast approval for the plane. In the process, Boeing disregarded the safety systems that its own engineers had recommended and did not fix known software issues with the 737 Max, which ultimately led to the crashes.

The root cause of the disaster at Boeing can be traced back to a cognitive error known as normalcy bias. This bias causes people to overestimate the likelihood that things will continue as they have been and underestimate the potential consequences of a disaster.

Ironically, the transformation of the airline industry in recent decades to make airplanes much safer and accidents incredibly rare is key to understanding Boeing’s disaster. The company’s leadership was overconfident in the safety record of their airplanes and saw FAA certification as an obstacle to doing business rather than a necessary safety measure. Boeing’s 737 Max disaster is a classic case of normalcy bias. This bias contributed to their decision to rush the production of the 737 Max and overlook known software issues.

Think it’s only big companies? Think again.

Normalcy bias is a big reason for bubbles — in stocks, housing prices, loans and other areas. It’s as though we’re incapable of remembering the previous bubble, even if it occurred only a few years ago.

Similarly, normalcy bias helps explain why leaders at companies of all sizes were so vastly unprepared for COVID-19 and its impact. While pandemics pose a major threat, it’s a low-likelihood, high-impact, slow-moving disaster. The normalcy bias keeps tripping us up on such disasters unless we take effective steps to deal with this problem.

Unfortunately, Boeing — and Congress — did not appear to learn this lesson in the rushed approval of the new 737 Max model. The fact that they failed to make the safety upgrade demanded by so many diverse external stakeholders signals that more deadly lessons may be in store for us in the future.

• Gleb Tsipursky is CEO of the hybrid work consultancy Disaster Avoidance Experts and author of the bestseller “Returning to the Office and Leading Hybrid and Remote Teams.”