What aviation design principles have to do with your career in the age of retrenchments
What do aviation design principles that came after Dan-Air 1977 accident have to do with your career in the age of massacre-like retrenchments?
Well, everything. In the early days of aviation, Boeing, Lockheed, and others focused mostly on the Safe-life principle: design the part so it lasts a predetermined service life, with no cracks or damage accepted during that life; once the life limit is reached, the part is replaced. This worked for some time, until De Havilland Comet deadly accidents that shifted the perspective from safe usage of the part before it is retired. Sounds similar in the blueprint of corporate careers of the past, right? "I can stay in this role/company for a fixed period and then I'll be fine."
After the accidents of De Havilland airplanes, the regulators and the industry came up with the Fail-safe concept which can accept that a part may fail, but design structure of the aircraft remains safe through redundancy and load redistribution until the damage is found. Replace before failure moved to survive the failure, and it was true for a while in corporate environments and careers as people moved to start ups and back to more senior positions. "Even if one role disappears, I have another load path."
Dan-Air accident in 1977 proved this principle wrong, too – even the fail-safe protocol and redundant secondary structures can fail in the wrong place and time; catastrophic fault can still happen despite secondary protection combined with inspections of the visible issues of the primary elements.
Fail safe is not safe anymore. If you think that the board of your employer does not have an Excel document outlining the most expensive people, or the most junior people in the region you are in – those who will be the first candidates to not pass the fail-safe test - you probably still believe in Santa Claus. Hidden cracks and in-service variability made simple life limits and visible-damage assumptions insufficient. That's where the Damage tolerance aviation design concept becomes more prominent: you need to go one step further and assume small cracks already exist, then prove the structure can tolerate them while inspections catch growth before it becomes critical.
How can this apply to you if you are sensing "I'm fine" is not working anymore? Well, think of design tolerance for careers: "I know my skills and market position are degrading in places, and I inspect and manage that before failure."
I work with clients who want to inspect their damage tolerance through aligning their meaning, purpose, skills and know-how. Just because your job still has time left on the clock does not mean the structure is holding.
Unscript IKIGAI® maps your Fail-Safe assumptions. The AI Coach runs your Damage Tolerance assessment.
The inspection is overdue.