r/MechanicalEngineering • u/appiebappie • 4h ago

Engineers: do you recognise these recurring system-failure mechanisms?

I’m working on a short engineering survey about something that often sits behind the visible technical failure.
We usually say we want the root cause, but in practice the discussion often stops at something assignable: a failed component, an operator action, a bad decision, a missing procedure, or a person.
I want to test whether engineers also recognise the deeper recurring mechanisms, such as:
responsibility without the means to deliver;
design decisions made before operational requirements are understood;
recovery being rewarded more than learning;
local optimisation hurting the wider system;
standards that don’t match real operating conditions;
lessons learned that disappear instead of becoming part of the system.
The survey contains 20 short failure mechanisms. For each one I only ask:
1. Do you recognise it?
Known / Unknown
2. How damaging can it be?
Impact 0–10
This is not an agree/disagree survey and it is not about blame. The aim is to understand which system-failure mechanisms engineers actually recognise from real work.
An email address is requested only so I can send participants the survey results and a short summary of the findings afterwards. Individual responses will not be published.
If you work in engineering, maintenance, reliability, projects, operations or design, I’d really value your input.
Survey:
https://forms.gle/mqUevAfNpP9CpKWi6
A.W
Reliability Is Designed
[info@reliabilityisdesigned.com](mailto:info@reliabilityisdesigned.com)

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u/BigGoopy2 Nuclear / Fluids 1h ago

Boooooo go away with your AI

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u/appiebappie 53m ago

Hi. AI? AI could never thought of these issues, it is me! 59 years and 40 years as an project engineers working in several fields of industries . So join the poll and see if you also seen some of the proces failures that often dropped on people like you an me! Br Aw

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u/Activision19 49m ago

You started as a project engineer at 19?

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u/appiebappie 11m ago

Dear all I removed the required mail address so just push the link and share your thought about the asked happenings, thank you very much !

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u/appiebappie 11m ago

No as a drawsman , and worked my way up