The boring spreadsheet invented by the military and why skipping it can cost millions

Failure modes and effects analysis didn’t start out as a nice-to-have. It was formalized by the US military in 1949, adapted by NASA for the Apollo missions and later migrated into automotive and consumer product development. It remains one of the most rigorously proven risk mitigation tools in engineering, and yet, it’s chronically under-utilized.

Drawing on 20 years of mechanical-design leadership in deep tech across aerospace, aviation and consumer hardware, this talk makes the case for treating FMEA as a living design tool owned by engineering, not a compliance checklist completed by quality. It also asks the harder engineering ethics question: Why do rigorous, well-understood risk processes erode under schedule and cost pressure, even when everyone involved knows better?

The talk utilizes industry case studies and real incidents from the speaker’s career, including a moment where a “good enough” compromise quietly became the new lowered standard. It examines how small, individually defensible compromises accumulate into systemic failure.

This is not a call for more paperwork. It’s a look at personal and organizational conditions that let good engineers make bad decisions, and how the FMEA process can objectively safeguard against them.

Attendees will leave with a concrete framework for applying FMEA as an early, cross-functional design tool and a clearer, more honest picture of why risk processes succeed or quietly fail.