Earlier I was comparing Boeing's MCAS with Volkswagen's emissions test defeat device. I found this old New Yorker article, from 2015, hypothesizing how Volkswagen may have got there:
https://www.newyorker.com/business/c...swagen-scandal
They say it may not have necessarily been an explicit management decision saying "let's cheat", but many small incremental changes that individually didn't seem a big deal (normalization of deviance):
If the same pattern proves to have played out at Volkswagen, then the scandal may well have begun with a few lines of engine-tuning software. Perhaps it started with tweaks that optimized some aspect of diesel performance and then evolved over time: detect this, change that, optimize something else. At every step, the software changes might have seemed to be a slight “improvement” on what came before, but at no one step would it necessarily have felt like a vast, emissions-fixing conspiracy by Volkswagen engineers, or been identified by Volkswagen executives. Instead, it would have slowly and insidiously led to the development of the defeat device and its inclusion in cars that were sold to consumers.
Initial reports mentioned that at least 30 Volkswagen managers were involved. And now, 4 years later, some of them have already been sentenced to jail time. So, at least in Volkswagen's case, it seems it was a bit more than just "normalization of deviance".