The Cemetery Of Unknowns

In his book TheBlackSwanBook, NassimNicholasTaleb? makes frequent references to the cemetery to show us that we easily fail to see a great part of what really happens in our world, we say, for example, that people that are bold have a greater chance for success, because we know of those that are successful and bold, but we fail to see that the cemetery is full of people that were bold, but failed silently, and, since they never achieved fame, nobody realizes that they were as bold as those that were successful. And we keep telling to the new generations: You want to be rich? be bold! when in reality more than 90% of those that were bold never achieved big economic success.

Another interesting example is that of UnknownHeros?: Those that change processes so that big catastrophic events never happen, imagine, for example, writes NassimNicholasTaleb?, that some law maker would have changed policies in airplanes before 9/11 to make it mandatory to use bulletproof doors that must be closed under all circumstances in all flights... imagine that law would start to be enforced on 9/10, and that no plane were able to fly after that day without the stronger security police... that law maker would have prevented the worst terrorist attack in USA! Do you think he would get a medal, or an statue for that? Do you think we would have become a national hero? Of course not, we would probably end his days forgotten, and with lots of enemies in the airline industries because of the costs of enforcing his/her security measures... some may even blame him for the economic failure of those airlines that were not able to recover from the expenses of improving security in their airplanes and went in to bankruptcy: "All because this crazy lawmaker thinks that some terrorists using knives can take down buildings"... How many other catastrophes we may never know about are being prevented, right now, because of heroes like this hypothetical one? How many of us live nice long lives thanks to them?

Same thing probably happens at companies that follow some processes when developing software, and are successful, they may never realize that because of some things that they take for granted, they are successful... and in other companies the same problem leads to failures that seem unstoppable: they do something that completely hampers software development, but that is so ingrained in the way the company works, that nobody is able to see it, and the company sinks in to bankruptcy.

Other times, the company might have a person, or a group, that, by following a certain process, avoids a catastrophic failure, but since they do it so well, nobody realizes that they are saving the company, and, so they reach the conclusion that those processes are useless, and they fire those who enforce them, change company policy... and sink in to an unpredictable catastrophic failure...