To Engineer Is Human: The Role of Failure in Successful Design

Petroski, a civil engineering professor at Duke, wrote the definitive popular account of why things break and why failure is not the opposite of good engineering but its essential companion. The book moves from the Tacoma Narrows Bridge to the Kansas City Hyatt Regency walkway collapse, showing in each case that disasters arise not from ignorance but from success — specifically, from the overconfidence that success breeds. The parallel to software is immediate and uncomfortable: systems fail when teams extrapolate from what worked before without understanding why it worked. Petroski writes with the clarity of a historian and the precision of an engineer, and his argument aligns directly with the Catmull and Edmondson tradition on psychological safety and the productive role of error. For anyone managing complex products, this book reframes failure from something to prevent into something to learn from — quickly, cheaply, and before it scales.