Systems design literature contains an empirical principle well known to engineering schools: expertise does not survive disuse. For decades, human factors analysts have warned that placing automation between the operator and physical materials creates immediate comfort that erodes the memory of the craft.
When a tool handles all ordinary work without requiring attention, people disengage from the process. If the task remains stable, the organisation records productivity gains. But when conditions depart from expectations or the technical system fails, it may discover that its teams lack the practice needed to respond without a screen in front of them.
The lesson of aeronautical engineering
In contemporary industrial history, the Boeing 737 MAX certification and control crisis exemplifies this organisational fracture.
The development of the 737 MAX was shaped by objectives of commercial continuity and training commonality with earlier models. MCAS was introduced to modify certain aircraft handling characteristics; treating it simply as a replacement for manual training overlooks the design and certification problems examined by investigators.
In its original design, MCAS could command stabiliser adjustments based on a single angle-of-attack sensor. That dependency and the assumptions about crews’ responses formed part of a wider safety problem.
The accidents showed the risk of unintended MCAS activation following erroneous data and repeated nose-down commands. The NTSB questioned assumptions about pilots’ recognition and responses amid multiple alerts and recommended improvements to design, procedures and training. Those findings alone do not establish that the crews had lost skills through disuse.
A program does not assume moral responsibility or replace the obligations of those who design, certify and operate a system. The organisational lesson is to examine design, oversight and training decisions together, without reducing an accident to a single cause or automatically assigning all responsibility to one committee.
The illusion of perfect operational management
This pathology is entering corporate decision-making centres unnoticed as generative and advanced analytical tools become standard:
- The loss of foundational training: complex strategic judgement does not emerge from nothing; it develops through years of working through elementary problems. When a company fully automates drafting, primary data analysis or technical synthesis, it removes the training through which its future executives could develop their own judgement.
- Collapse in the face of an anomaly: machines excel at identifying correlations in repetitive situations using historical data. Yet an organisation’s decisive moments occur when reality breaks the statistical pattern. Someone who has learned only to validate technical outputs becomes paralysed when software contradicts the facts.
- Subordination to the protocol: when people lose the ability to check reasoning manually, supervision becomes an act of blind faith. Professionals approve what the screen indicates because they lack the technical competence to formulate an alternative hypothesis and defend it before the committee.
Preserving the craft in the technological age
Mature systems governance does not propose abandoning automation or returning to archaic procedures out of operational nostalgia.
Instead, it requires the clarity to design organisations with cognitive redundancy: structures in which technical tools coexist with deliberate, periodic practice of unaided judgement.
An institution’s true strength is measured by the presence of professionals who retain the expertise, experience and independence of judgement needed to disconnect a machine, take manual control and answer for the consequences when the system goes into a tailspin, rather than by the speed with which algorithms resolve daily routines.
