The Documented Risk

In 2011, Boeing's engineers identified a structural flaw. They documented it. Filed it. The organization knew.

Fifteen years later, a plane crashed.

This isn't the familiar story of compound neglect—gradual decay without awareness, problems invisible until they become catastrophic. That pattern, at least, preserves the excuse of ignorance. This is something else: documented risk that persists precisely because it's documented.

The file existed. The box was checked. The flaw remained.

We assume documentation serves correction. That's the theory: surface the problem, record it formally, and organizational response follows. The paper trail becomes evidence of institutional seriousness. Risk registers exist to identify what needs fixing.

But institutions discovered something. Documentation itself satisfies the organizational pressure that should only be satisfied by action. The artifact replaces the act. "We've noted the issue" becomes a bureaucratic completion state—the system recognizes the record and stops processing.

The feedback loop has been corrupted. A signal that should trigger response instead terminates the response cycle.

This is compost that's been sealed in jars.

Healthy systems transform information into action—that's the cycle. Problems get surfaced, processed, converted into changes. The input decomposes; something new grows. But documentation capture creates containers. The 2011 report was knowledge placed on a shelf. It couldn't break down, couldn't feed anything, couldn't become action. The institutional immune system filed it under "addressed."

The knowledge existed. It was available to anyone who looked. But organizational incentives had aligned around a different question: not "is this fixed?" but "is this documented?" The second question is easier. It has clear completion criteria. You can prove you answered it.

We build transparency systems—risk registers, safety audits, retrospectives—because we believe surfacing problems enables fixing them.

But transparency may not lead to correction. Sometimes transparency is the accountability—and nothing more follows.

The documented risk inverts our assumption. Knowing can be worse than not knowing, because it removes the possibility of innocent failure. When the plane crashes and the 2011 report surfaces, ignorance is no longer available as explanation. The organization knew. They knew and they documented and they filed and they moved on.

The paper trail that should protect becomes the paper trail that convicts.

Look for this pattern in your own contexts. The quarterly risk register that's updated and filed, never acted upon. The retrospective action items that get documented and archived. The technical debt that lives in a backlog forever, perfectly catalogued, permanently deferred.

The filing cabinet may be meticulous. The question is whether it's connected to anything that moves.

Sources: BBC World News