#ISSS2019 Corvallis

This talk and paper will present lists of recurring systems problems, dysfunctions, or pathologies found in natural and engineered systems. It will begin by citing the several reasons that the production of lists in several professions, for example, captaining ships, surgery, and piloting airplanes, has proven to reduce failures of complex systems and the human operation, design, or production of such systems. It will note that many such lists already have been assembled; but that there is a strong need for the diverse lists, produced by systems thinkers, systems scientists and systems engineers to become aware of each other and integrated. Because of the immense costs of such recurring failures, society could save a great deal of money and lives by avoiding the failures witnessed and documented in the past. Also that the problems are observed to occur and reoccur is an indication that there is something at the causal level of understanding systems that results in their repetitive occurrence. But these savings will be dependent on scrutinizing the current listings and finding similarities to reduce the list of redundancies. We will present 138 failure cases in systems engineering, 45 in the general systems fields, and 83 where the list-makers have tried to relate the systems failures to their fundamental systems causes. This produces a grand total of nearly 300 recurring problems to examine. The talk will end with suggestion of several institutional and organizational responses to the potential of this approach to systems pathologies.