Joshua Braun

And he landed on two types of issues that when they are combined, create one of these systems.

And that's where all of the different moving pieces interact in ways that you can't really predict.

The other thing that he was zeroing in on was what he called tight coupling.

And what he said is you can...

Have an organization that deals in technology and they can have either one of those problems and they're manageable.

But if you have both of them together, it's really difficult to deal with this.

And the reason is because the sort of solutions that you might impose pull in opposite directions.

So if you've got the system where the problems have to do with really high levels of automation, great.

You create a checklist of what to do in situations A, B, and C. And then when something goes wrong, the employee in charge just has to pull the lever, right?

Or if you've got the system that's very interactively complex, you know that you need people to be able to kind of stop and troubleshoot on the ground and so on.

But if you have both of those things together, there are different management strategies.

One is a very top-down thing.

The other is very bottom-up.

And so it's really hard to manage for both at the same time.

And so what he said basically is if you have a system that's like that, that at some point it is definitely going to fail.

And the reason this was all controversial is because a lot of the systems that he identified as being like this are ones that people would like to believe are going to work, right?

Nuclear power and things of that nature, right?

And so he's saying that these accidents don't necessarily happen frequently, but they are going to happen.

And so my thought about

how this all relates to the digital advertising space, is that it has all of the features that he was talking about, right?