This is very good: How Complex Systems Fail (pdf) – hat tip to John Allspaw via his blog. I particularly like the swipe at root cause analysis. This is a nice complement to the wonderful book Normal Accidents, which I mention here.
Update: via @gully this cartoon is great too, I’ve added one frame here as an illustration
Are you familiar with the book “Systemantics” by John Gall?
http://vielmetti.typepad.com/vacuum/2005/05/a_concise_summa.html
is a concise summary of this perspective on how systems work and how they fail.
Ed – no – Thanks! I’ve requested it from interlibrary.