[gen220]

As it turns out, there were in fact engineers who recognized that the O rings were eroding and that this was dangerous. They even tried to communicate this fact to the people with launch cancelling authority. But they weren’t able to communicate it effectively enough to prevent the launch.

Apparently, all of the engineers knew intuitively that the problem was real and critical, but weren’t able to communicate it to their superiors, who lacked the same intuitive grounding. They failed to visualize the data convincingly, and the launch went as planned.

It was an example of the system working, until people ignored the warnings about the O-rings. That decision to move on, rather than to investigate critically, was the moment when the system shifted from working to failing.

Edward Tufte wrote a really convincing treatment of this in “The Visual Design of Quantitative Information, and Envisioning Information“, to motivate the importance of proper visualizations.

You can read a blog with the visualizations here [1] but I really recommend the book!

[1] https://www.asktog.com/books/challengerExerpt.html