ABSTRACT
If there is one idea that Newton and Descartes have taught us when things go wrong, it is to look for the broken component. Nothing characterizes the Newtonian-Cartesian worldview as much as its emphasis on analytic reduction, or decomposition. The story in Chapter 2, of course, is about a broken part – the jackscrew/acme nut on an MD-80 airliner. Though perhaps it is more correct to say that the story starts with a broken part. In itself the part isn’t that interesting. If we want to understand why it ended up broken, analytic reduction doesn’t get us very far. Instead, we need to go up and out, rather than down and in. We have to begin to probe the hugely intertwined webs of relationships that spring out and away from the broken part, into the organizational, the institutional, the social. Yet often our quest to understand why parts are broken simply leads us to other broken parts. The decompositional logic is almost everywhere.
