Failure As "What" Versus "Who"

Failure typically has a "who" response - - who do you blame for a failure?  Who was at fault?  An accident or unexpected event seems to always have the moral overtones of who to blame and who to punish.

But pull out the dictionary and look up the word "reliability" - - "what one can count on not to fail while doing what is expected of it."  When I get up in the morning to start my car and go to work, reliability and three questions intersect as I turn the key:

1. What do people count on?
2. What do people expect from the things they count on?
3. In what ways can the things people count on fail?

The answers to these three important failure and reliability questions provide clues about what it is that could go wrong and what it is that you don't want to go wrong.  The key word in all three questions is "what" one can count on, not "who".  A preoccupation with failure is a preoccupation with maintaining reliable performance (i.e., periodic maintenance of you car so it gets you to work).  And reliable performance is a system issue (the reliability of my car is fundamentally a "what" issue), not an individual issue (a "who").  Failures are connected.  Small events that are the outcome of earlier, more distant conditions predispose subsequent events to deviate from the expected.