Predictable

Documented, foreseeable risks that were ignored anyway. The failure is attention, not information.

Someone wrote it down before it happened. A report, an inspection, a memo, a complaint. The information existed and moved through the organisation, and the decision to act on it never got made.

How to spot it. Look for the paper trail that predates the event. In this quadrant it almost always exists.

Pen-and-ink drawing: a concrete dam wall with a long structural crack running across it. The crack has been studied for years, with monitoring pins and survey marks fixed along its length, and a thick inspection report is pinned to a weathered noticeboard below it.

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19Events in this quadrant

Every event filed in Q1 Predictable

Air Canada chatbot2024A tribunal held an airline liable for a refund policy its chatbot invented.
Synapse / Evolve2024'FDIC-insured' deposits froze when a ledger intermediary failed to reconcile.
Greensill Capital2021Boring invoice finance that hid concentrated, under-insured, speculative lending.
Zillow Offers2021An AI home-pricing model overpaid at scale and forced Zillow to exit.
WeWork failed IPO2019Valued at $47 billion as a tech unicorn. It leased buildings for 15 years and rented desks by the month.
PG&E bankruptcy / Camp Fire2019A worn hook on a tower unclimbed since 2001 killed 85 people and bankrupted the utility.
Thomas Cook collapse2019178 years old, drowned in £1.7bn of debt. Its collapse left the state to fly 150,000 travellers home.
Carillion collapse2018A construction empire owing £7bn with £29m in the bank. Its big contracts booked profits they were losing.
Morandi Bridge collapse (Genoa)2018The designer warned in 1979 that sea air would corrode the cables. 43 died when the bridge came down.
Grenfell Tower fire2017The cladding failed its fire tests. The Inquiry found the testing was manipulated, and a tower was wrapped in it anyway.
Tianjin port explosions2015One overheated container of nitrocellulose. Next door, 800 tonnes of ammonium nitrate on bribed permits.
GM ignition-switch recall2014A key that slipped to off shut down the airbags. GM knew for a decade and fixed nothing.
2014 Sony Pictures hack2014North Korea wiped a studio's computers to kill a Seth Rogen comedy about killing Kim Jong-un.
Rana Plaza collapse2013Cracks aired on TV the night before. Refuse the shift, lose a month's pay. They went in.
Target data breach2013Phished the air-conditioning vendor into 40 million cards. The alarms fired. Nobody answered.
Kodak Chapter 11 Bankruptcy2012Invented the digital camera in 1975, then buried it to protect film. Bankrupt by 2012, $6.75B in debt.
BlackBerry / RIM collapse2011The iPhone shipped in 2007. RIM kept building keyboards. $70B in market value gone by 2012.
Toyota unintended-acceleration recall2010Toyota bragged internally about saving $100M by negotiating the recall down. It cost them $1.2 billion.
General Motors bankruptcy2009America's biggest carmaker spent decades ignoring the math. The bailout cost taxpayers $11.2 billion.

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