William B. Rouse explores eighteen well-known cases of high-consequence failures to outline a conceptual approach to integrated failure management, enabling a cross-cutting of system design principles and practices and an assurance that failure management in any context need not start with a blank slate.

William B. Rouse is Research Professor in the McCourt School of Public Policy at Georgetown University. He is also Senior Fellow in the office of the Senior Vice President for Research, Professor Emeritus, and former Chair of the School of Industrial and Systems Engineering at the Georgia Institute of Technology, and Principal at Curis Meditor, a firm focused on the health of people, processes, organizations, and society. His research focuses on mathematical and computational modeling for policy design and analysis in complex public-private systems, with particular emphasis on healthcare, higher education, transportation, and national security. His recent books include Computing Possible Futures (Oxford, 2019), Universities as Complex Enterprises (Wiley, 2016), and Modeling and Visualization of Complex Systems and Enterprises (Wiley, 2015).

• 1: Introduction and Overview


• 2: Multi-Level Framework


• 3: Failures of Complex Systems


• 4: Failures of Complex Organizations


• 5: Failures of Complex Ecosystems


• 6: Multi-Level Analyses


• 7: Failure Management


• 8: Enabling Change