If you've ever read Crichton's excellent book Airframe, you know that he, by way of his real search with commercial pilots and the NTSB, makes the thesis that commercial airplane crashes are almost always the result of multiple failures together leading to a crash
A good example is the early 767 that just ran out of full crossing Canada. If the entry below is to be believed, at least a half dozen factors had to come together for that plane to lose both engines. Bad pilot instructions, bad mathematical calculations, bad cockpit gauges, incomplete instructional material, incomes maintenance and so on. All had to be there for that (near) disaster to occur, and if not for the pilot (and his off-hours glider hobby - just like Sully!) nearly 70 lives would have been lost.
Gimli Glider - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
But it seems to me that Crichton's assertion is relevant in so many other areas of life too.
For example, in my own business career, very seldom have I worried about chain reactions like the sort I mentioned. Usually I remain concerned about solo concepts etc. but in reality, whether you are discussing aviation, business, engineering or even social settings/relationships, I suspect that the things that truly bite us in the ass seldom happen alone. The trick for me, I think, is to try to focus on the interrelatedness of things and what can happen if they all go south, rather than the simpler strategy of just looking at issues as if they stand alone. I suspect if I honestly focus on the larger problems I've encountered in my 51 years, many could have been avoided or lessened if I had done so.
That - or maybe everyone else just "got" that at an earlier age than I...