The Politics of Failure: How Technical Crises Become Tools for Organizational Power

The article examines a critical organizational pathology: strategically-minded engineers who deliberately engineer or exploit perceived system failures not to solve them, but to justify replacing them with preferred alternatives. Unlike the natural human tendency to scapegoat in crisis, these individuals systematically manufacture crises to accumulate organizational power and reshape technical systems according to their vision. This matters because it reveals why system replacements sometimes ignore actual root causes and why organizations repeatedly cycle through costly, unnecessary migrations.