Failure spreads faster through successful organizations than through struggling ones. This is the counterintuitive core of what organizational sociologist Diane Vaughan called 'the normalization of deviance' — a process she documented in forensic detail after the Challenger disaster, where NASA engineers repeatedly observed warning signals, noted them, and then, because nothing catastrophic followed, reclassified them as acceptable. The signals didn't change. The human response to them did. What Vaughan identified wasn't negligence or cynicism but something more insidious: the gradual, social process by which groups in high-functioning environments learn to treat anomalies as baseline. Each safe outcome after a warning becomes evidence that the warning was overblown — until the one time it isn't. The practical implication sits right at the intersection of behavioral pattern and organizational design. When your team routinely hits its targets, that's precisely when the threshold for raising concerns quietly rises. Success doesn't make people complacent in the lazy sense — it makes them epistemically conservative in a socially rational way. Nobody wants to be the person who cried wolf after twelve normal launches. The corrective Vaughan implies isn't a hotline or an open-door policy. It's creating a norm where anomalies are reported and recorded even when outcomes are fine — so the pattern becomes visible before the catastrophe makes it obvious.

What anomaly in your current work have you seen three or more times and stopped mentioning, because nothing bad happened the previous times?

Drawing from Sociology of organizations / disaster studies — Diane Vaughan