Comment by emarsden

This is debatable. Perhaps the poor quality management issues and lack of rigour that have been seen in various Boeing production facilities are a case of normalization of deviance. However, the original problem with the 737 MAX was the top management decision not to invest in a new airframe design for cost/strategic reasons, to oblige designers to implement various unsafe workarounds to accommodate larger and more fuel-efficient engines that made the plane unstable, and to ruthlessly silence engineers who argued that this was unsafe. This problem was compounded by the FAA's move to increased delegation of safety oversight to designer-manufacturers, which left it with insufficient ability independently to assess the new design. These are both big, important decisions made by top leaders of the two organizations, rather than the slow progressive evolution driven by people's efforts to optimize their bit of the workplace which characterizes drift to danger.