Originally Posted by
MELDreamer
"...to intentionally create an environment that can derail..." or did you mean "NOT to intentionally create an environment that can derail."
Maybe I'm misreading or misunderstanding your post.
Apologies for the misunderstanding.
Let me elaborate.
When one wants (at engineering) to create the best results, going "beyond" the current state of technology, one needs to take care, the engineers working on this, do cooperate together. Not only inside a (small) group of engineers, working on a specific topic, though also among the groups of engineers, relevant for that topic.
The disadvantage of such an approach is, that engineers tend to "keep working" on solutions, without ever reaching a result, they are "happy" with (the nature of engineers, to create the best of the best). The effect of that is, that the time and money spend on the items at place, will be "unlimited". So, you need measures in place to keep a tab on this happening.
What Boeing did was compartmentalize the engineers in their own groups and let the communication between those groups go through managers. Very effective to keep the time and costs low, that works at the micro-level. Unfortunately, at Boeing, it shows all signs in what is being reported, the "gatekeeper" managers, just chopped off the engineer group interaction, before suitable engineered solutions were developed. So, immature solutions were brought into production and the final products. (More companies struggle with that: Philips respirators, for example).
So, intentionally, Boeing did create an engineering environment, aiming to keep the development costs/lead-time low, at the expense of an inferior product. From the Forkner messages and a lot of other leaked messages, it is clear, the engineers involved with the development did not support these limitations. Not to say, when being a major engineering company, one is responsible to set up an engineering environment that can create mature products, this is a major item for the companies top management (IE, "security is our first priority"). This is where Boeing top management just failed and followed their own goal, "profit above everything else". This change of the organization into a profit over security model, was a deliberate action.
Make top managers personally/criminally responsible for the fall-out of their intentional actions, which will derail the development of suitable secure products, and this whole "security is our first priority" theater will finally become a reality. I hope, it's clear now.