mind those misses

An article in HBR suggests a way to avoid catastrophes by focusing on near misses, situations where luck saved the day.

The authors describe how latent errors (such as gas leakage at an oil rig) combine with enabling conditions (a windless day or a welder working nearby) to cause failure (think of the BP Gulf disaster).

Lessons for InfoSec are to leverage incident reporting to catch smaller mishaps and to explicitly manage vulnerabilities as a precursor to risk identification with threat sources.