Robert Szczesniak
I currently work for UOP as a Chief Technical Advisor. This includes traveling globally to customer sites to lead teams responsible for start-up, turnaround, or revamp project involving UOP technologies. My experience is primarily in Aromatics with exposure to all aspects of refining. Prior to UOP I worked as an environmental consultant gaining extensive experience in project management, report writing, regulation, data analysis, and field work.

The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable is written by Nassim Nicholas Taleb.If you were to try to apply this to something in the engineering world--and I do think that there are many areas where this line of thought can be very useful if not possible to put into an SOP--I think the most direct would be safety. Hopefully, accidents are a highly improbable. But by acknowledging the potential and being prepared, the impact of such events can be minimized. Taking the above example of car travel, if you recognize that there are inherent risks to car travel you can take precautions, like wearing a seat belt, and minimize the effect of an accident. If your workplace included heights, wearing fall protection would minimize the result of a slip or fall.
Has anyone else read The Black Swan? What did you think?
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Comments
Robert,
Another good read, mentioned in "The Black Swan," is "Ubiquity: Why Catastrophes Happen" by Mark Buchanan. In it, the author explains the power law feature of unstable systems, and how a seemingly small event is often what triggers the catastrophe.
Marty Bergstedt
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