Strategic Planning (& Risk Analysis): June 8, 2021

Title: When Redundancy Backfires in National Security and Business: How Efforts to Increase Safety and Reliability Can Decrease Safety and Reliability

Presented By: Scott Sagan, Ph.D.; Professor of Political Science; Senior Fellow at the Center for International Security and Cooperation (CISAC), Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies, Stanford University.

Description: Failures, accidents, and near-accidents are common in complex military and business organizations. After an organizational failure, there are incentives to devote more resources and more personnel to address the problems deemed to have caused the failure. Redundancy, it is said, can make a reliable system out of unreliable parts. Adding more resources or personnel can backfire, however, if it leads to three phenomena that have been called “the problem of redundancy problem,” redundancy can create hidden common-mode failures causing new failures.  Redundancy can produce social shirking, making personnel or units less reliable. And redundancy can backfire if it creates a false sense of safety, leading the organization to operate at a higher tempo or riskier manner. This webinar will discuss examples of these problems in military organizations and apply the insights to other organizations.

Learning Outcomes:

• Participants will be able to identify the common causes of organizational failures and accidents
• Participants will be able to analyze the ways in which adding redundancy in the name of reliability can backfire
• Participants will be able to identify alternative ways to deal with repeated accidents or failures

Biography: Scott D. Sagan is the Caroline S.G. Munro Professor of Political Science, the Mimi and Peter Haas University Fellow in Undergraduate Education, and Senior Fellow at the Center for International Security and Cooperation and the Freeman Spogli Institute at Stanford University. He also serves as Chairman of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences’ Committee on International Security Studies. Before joining the Stanford faculty, Sagan was a lecturer in the Department of Government at Harvard University and served as special assistant to the director of the Organization of the Joint Chiefs of Staff in the Pentagon. Sagan has also served as a consultant to the office of the Secretary of Defense and at the Sandia National Laboratory and the Los Alamos National Laboratory.

Sagan is the author of Moving Targets: Nuclear Strategy and National Security (Princeton University Press, 1989); The Limits of Safety: Organizations, Accidents, and Nuclear Weapons (Princeton University Press, 1993); and, with co-author Kenneth N. Waltz, The Spread of Nuclear Weapons: An Enduring Debate (W.W. Norton, 2012). He is the co-editor of Learning from a Disaster: Improving Nuclear Safety and Security after Fukushima (Stanford University Press, 2016) with Edward D. Blandford and co-editor of Insider Threats (Cornell University Press, 2017) with Matthew Bunn. Sagan was also the guest editor of a two-volume special issue of Daedalus: Ethics, Technology, and War (Fall 2016) and The Changing Rules of War (Winter 2017).

Recent publications include “Does the Noncombatant Immunity Norm Have Stopping Power?” with Benjamin A. Valentino in International Security (Fall 2020); “Why the atomic bombing of Hiroshima would be illegal today” with Katherine E. McKinney and Allen S. Weiner in The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists (July 2020); “Weighing Lives in War: How National Identity Influences American Public Opinion about Foreign Civilian and Compatriot Fatalities” with Benjamin A. Valentino in the Journal of Global Security Studies (December 2019); “On Reciprocity, Revenge, and Replication: A Rejoinder to Walzer, McMahan, and Keohane” with Benjamin A. Valentino in Ethics & International Affairs (Winter 2019); and “Armed and Dangerous: When Dictators Get the Bomb” in Foreign Affairs (October 2018).

In 2018, Sagan received the Andrew Carnegie Fellowship from the Carnegie Corporation of New York. In 2017, he received the International Studies Association’s Susan Strange Award which recognizes the scholar whose “singular intellect, assertiveness, and insight most challenge conventional wisdom and intellectual and organizational complacency” in the international studies community. Sagan was also the recipient of the National Academy of Sciences William and Katherine Estes Award in 2015, for his work addressing the risks of nuclear weapons and the causes of nuclear proliferation. The award, which is granted triennially, recognizes “research in any field of cognitive or behavioral science that advances understanding of issues relating to the risk of nuclear war.” In 2013, Sagan received the International Studies Association’s International Security Studies Section Distinguished Scholar Award. He has also won four teaching awards: Stanford’s 1998-99 Dean’s Award for Distinguished Teaching; Stanford’s 1996 Hoagland Prize for Undergraduate Teaching; the International Studies Association’s 2008 Innovative Teaching Award; and the Monterey Institute for International Studies’ Nonproliferation Education Award in 2009.

Research Interests: Nuclear strategy | Ethics and war | Public opinion about the use of force | Nuclear non-proliferation and arms control | Safety of hazardous technology.