Failure-of-imagination
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
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- This article is regarding engineering and related failures of imagination. The Wikipedia article Failure of imagination specifically refers only to the political aspect of intelligence agencies and government officials failure to foresee the credible risk of suicide aircraft hijackers using airliners as weapons.
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Failure of imagination is a general phrase for not having predicted or foreseen something which was possible to predict or foresee.
In failure analysis, one major category of failures are design or conceptual failures. In some cases these are due to encountering previously truly unknown conditions, situations that the designers were both unaware of and did not understand. In other cases, conditions which were understandable occur, but were not predicted or imagined.
A Taxonomy of understanding and awareness
| Aware | Not aware | |
|---|---|---|
| Understand | Known knowns | Unknown knowns - Failures of Imagination |
| Don't understand | Known unknowns | Unknown Unknowns - True unknowns |
In predicting reliability and possible failure modes, the risk that there are significant foreseeable failures which have escaped oversight in the specification and design process must be assessed. In well understood fields with mature products, this risk is typically minor, but should never be assumed to be zero. In new endeavours, and immature engineering organizations, the risk is higher.
