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The Current Transcript for May 14, 2018

Host: Anna Maria Tremonti

STORIES FROM THIS EPISODE

Listen to the full episode

Prologue

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VOICE: My sister, my mom, they've always been able to walk the streets safe. You know, they're living a pretty good life here, but me, I always wanted something bigger.

ANNA MARIA TREMONTI: That search for something bigger is apparently what drove the man you just heard to leave his Toronto area home to eventually become, by his own admission, both an enforcer and a killer for ISIS. He's been back in this country for about three years, but his latest admission and then his denial of what he said has raised serious questions. From whether returning ISIS recruits are being tracked in Canada, to why we haven't seen the arrest and prosecution of any of them. In a moment what the story of Abu Huzaifa tells us about the limits of our own laws. Also speaking of unforeseen limits, some would call that a systems failure. If it is, it's not the only one.

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VOICE: There has been a nuclear accident in the Soviet Union and the Soviets have admitted that it happened. One of the atomic reactors at the Chernobyl Atomic Power Plant near the city of Kiev was damaged.

AMT: From nuclear accidents to aviation failures to collapsed businesses, how is it that some of the most complex and most thought out technologies or projects can meet with catastrophic failure. In an hour our Project Adaptation looks at the reasons for organizational failure and how to think differently to anticipate and avoid it. And the early romance novels were embodied by this steamy image of one man. The model who was on the cover of so many paperbacks.

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VOICE: Hi, I'm Fabio. I'm so pleased you decide to spend some time with me.

AMT: And to some critics, today's romance novels aren't any better.

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VOICE: I don't think they were meant to be considered as actual writing. The same way that Twinkie wasn't meant to be considered as actual food.

AMT: Which brings us to a decision by the Toronto Public Library to seek out a romance novelist, as its next Writer-In-Residence. Here the defense of the romance novel, in half an hour. I'm Anna Maria Tremonti. This is The Current.

Canada must strengthen laws that deal with returning ISIS fighters, says former security analyst

Guests: John Lancaster, Stephanie Carvin

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VOICE: He was wearing an orange jumpsuit, slight beard, cut face like square. He was blindfolded. It was like a black leather, rubbery-type blindfold.

AMT: The man you hear speaking goes by the nom du guerre of Abu Huzaifa. He is what CSIS calls an "extremist traveler." One of approximately 60 such extremists that CSIS says are walking free today in Canada. When CBC spoke with him last year, he admitted to having travelled to Syria to join ISIS. He denied, however, taking part in any ISIS killings and he had nothing to say about being groomed by ISIS to carry out foreign attacks. But in a newly released interview with a New York Times reporter, he tells a different story.

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VOICE: He was wearing an orange jumpsuit, slight beard, cut face like square. He was blindfolded. It was like a black leather, rubbery type blindfold. We tied his hands with this wire thing and I'm just trying to build up the courage to do it. After that, I stabbed him. The blood was just, it was warm.

AMT: That interview comes from the New York Times podcast, "Caliphate," in which Abu Huzaifa describes what he calls the second execution, he says he carried out while in Syria in 2014. But the now 23-year-old now claims he made that story up. In an interview with CBC News on Friday, he denied killing anyone when asked about his statements in that podcast. So which is it? His story has raised alarms about the threat of former extremist recruits back home in Canada. They prompted this question Friday from Conservative House Leader Candice Bergen.

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VOICE: This guy is apparently in Toronto. Canadians deserve more answers from this government. Why aren't they doing something about this despicable animal who's walking around the country.

VOICE 2: Canadians can be very assured that the government of Canada, the security agencies and police agencies of the government of Canada are making sure that they know all of the facts that they need to know and that they are taking all the measures that are, that are necessary to keep Canadians safe.

AMT: Public Safety Minister Ralph Goodale answering a question from Conservative House Leader Candice Bergen in the House of Commons Friday, before, we should point out Abu Huzaifa changed the story he told The New York Times reporter, Rukmini Callimachi. The Current reached out to Ms. Callimachi for comment. A New York Times spokesperson responded with an email saying the Times had "confirmed with multiple intelligence agencies" that the man who calls himself Abu Huzaifa, had been a member of ISIS and had traveled to Syria. The Times statement added that forthcoming episodes of its podcast would detail fact-checking that went into reporting his story. The Times says it was based on several interviews that took place over a 16-month period beginning in November of 2016. In a moment we'll hear from a security expert who says there is more that Canada can be doing on this wider issue including strengthening Canadian law. But first I'm joined by CBC reporter John Lancaster who interviewed the man calling himself Abu Huzaifa, last year and then again on Friday. John Lancaster, hello.

JOHN LANCASTER: Good morning.

AMT: So he told you one thing, he told her another, you went back and tried to clarify, what happened?

JL: Well, we approached this man at a restaurant where he was working and he had his back to us when we entered the restaurant. We called him by his real name and he turned around and gave us a quick smile, then realized why we were there and appeared a bit shocked, actually. He agreed to sit down with us, inside this business and we told him we have a big problem. That when we first interviewed you back in September 2017, we agreed to protect your identity on the terms that you tell the truth and so we sat down to him and said if you're lying to us, we probably don't have the obligation to protect you anymore. So can you tell us please, did you lie to us or did you lie the New York Times? And we put that to him repeatedly, unequivocally and he claims he was lying to the New York Times. I don't think we'll ever know who he was telling the truth to. He claims that he was essentially childish. He put these interviews in context, saying these were done October 30th and 31st, 2016, two or three weeks after he had returned from Pakistan. He was deported there after he fled Syria into Turkey, they deported him to Pakistan, he came back to Canada and he says at the time he was PTSD-ed. He was having flashbacks, nightmares, using ketamine, heroin, anything he could get his hands on to essentially self-medicate to put these nightmares behind him.

AMT: So he spoke to you the first time, after he spoke to them. You spoke to him the first time when?

JL: 2017.

AMT: 2017, OK yeah.

JL: So about a year after he spoke to The New York Times.

AMT: Right, OK.

JL: He said he was childless at the time he spoke to The New York Times. He said that he wasn't in the right frame of mind that at the time he was still very much believing in ISIS's cause, perhaps not their means, but the cause. He believed that there should be an Islamic state. He told us, and again we said this doesn't really add up because the level of detail you presented in that New York Times podcast, is just it's incredible. This isn't, these weren't passing references. He explained that by saying these were things he saw routinely, crucifixions, horrific executions from a wide variety of ways. And he said basically, he was so close to it that it may have well have been him.

AMT: Now you talked to him Friday, but you had talked to him again before that, did you see a difference in the guy you were talking to?

JL: A big difference.

AMT: From the first time or the second time.

JL: When we first sat down with him, back in September 2017, I got the impression this was someone who, his eyes appeared dark, he appeared to be still radicalized, he didn't speak openly I didn't think, he seemed to be reserved holding things back. However he swore up and down that he didn't have blood on his hands. And again, who knows, if he did or not. I don't think anyone's ever going to know, except for him. However, when we saw him on Friday, he appeared to be a much different person. His eyes were bright, he was clean-cut, he looked like any, you know, 23-year-old guy.

AMT: If you passed him on a street, you wouldn't know.

JL: Yeah exactly. I mean he had no visible signs of being extremist.

AMT: I want to ask you about one specific thing. In the "Caliphate" podcast he tells the New York Times journalist about meeting with Amniyat al-Kharji, the group within ISIS that is believed to have planned and carried out the November 2015 attacks in Paris, including on the Bataclan nightclub. Listen to this:

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VOICE 1: It was a government building.

VOICE 2: And it is there that he suddenly looks around and sees people from all over the world.

VOICE 1: And there was a lot. There was Australians there, there was British nationals, Belgians, French.

VOICE 2: From Asia, from North America, from Europe.

VOICE 1: There was also Central Asian, couple of Americans, two or three other Canadians. Up there, they had like just on the wall, a projection of Google Maps and you know, the battlefield map and everything. To show how possible attacks could be carried out.

AMT: John Lancaster did he mention any of that to you?

JL: He did on Friday. He actually went into a fair bit of detail. He describes being in this room and they were shown maps of various North American cities, European cities, how they could recruit local sympathetic individuals to help carry out these attacks, how to assemble weapons, how to flee the jurisdiction once an attack had been committed. He also talks about meeting, for the first time another Canadian, Abu Turab, whose real name we believe to be Muhammad Ali, he was a student here in Toronto at Ryerson University. He left to join ISIS in 2013. And he talks about just the intensity. He said the people who were leading this meeting were Iraqi ISIS members, more senior members, he said there were many young recruits there and they were urged to go out and commit these attacks. They were given instructions on how they could do it. That he doesn't deny, whatsoever.

AMT: So that's interesting because that's an overlap then and that's consistent, consistency in the overlap as opposed to the things he's denying, that he said to both you and the New York Times.

JL: Yeah. For what it's worth, when it comes to whether or not he has blood on his hands, whether or not he killed people, he's offered to take a polygraph test. For what it's worth.

AMT: Well it's interesting because are not the RCMP and CSIS supposed to meet with him this week?

JL: On Friday, after this was raised in the House, he got a call from CSIS, he says it was almost a jovial conversation. They told him you're famous again. They're talking about you. Then over the weekend, the RCMP contacted him and both agencies are planning to sit down with him as early as tomorrow.

AMT: So what, like an appointment?

JL: Almost. In fact, CSIS told him, when it's convenient for you, according to him anyway, they didn't say, report at a certain time, certain location, they kind of left it open-ended.

AMT: OK. So you covered this a lot, am I wrong to feel, to be a little incredulous that they make an appointment with a guy who has, he's got an inconsistent story, but he has also confessed to killing people for ISIS on tape. You make an appointment?

JL: Well that's the reality, isn't it though. I mean what can they do with these guys. That's the problem and I think he knows that, he knew that. But for the first time, I think, when my colleague Nazim Baksh and I sat down with him on Friday, he was worried. I think for the first time, he thought, "OK, I could be in a lot of trouble." In fact, at one point he broke down in tears, put his head down on the table where we were talking and then a couple of seconds later snapped right up, straightened up and said, you know, "It's ok, it's ok, I'm good at keeping these things inside." But he's worried, he is.

AMT: Before I let you go, why did he come home? What did he tell you?

JL: Well he did a lot of things. He was an ISIS policeman, enforcing Sharia law. He took people to jail. He says he was making 70 dollars a month, had to buy his own uniform, buy his own gun. He said once his family found out where he really was, they thought he was in Pakistan, his mother told him, "You are an oppressor. You're not helping anyone. You're as bad as the people who you claim to be fighting against." So that's what he said was enough to bring him home.

AMT: Fascinating, John Lancaster. Thank you.

JL: Thank you.

AMT: John Lancaster, investigative reporter for CBC News, he interviewed Abu Huzaifa in September of 2017 and again, on Friday. He's with me in our Toronto studio. Well, Stephanie Carvin has been listening to both the podcast, she's listening in on what we're saying here, she's a former national security analyst with the Canadian government. She is an assistant professor of International Relations at Carleton University and she joins us from our Ottawa studio. Hello Stephanie.

STEPHANIE CARVIN: Good morning.

AMT: What are we supposed to make of a man who admits in great detail, to executing for people for ISIS to one reporter and denies it twice, to another reporter.

SC: Well I think, you know, maybe everyone's getting a good sense of what it is like to work in an intelligence agency because this is very normal. This is not an unusual thing to happen, that stories change, that we can't really verify, we don't really have a good idea what happened, but this is the reality of intelligence, when you're looking at individuals who go and join conflicts overseas.

AMT: And so, should he be prosecuted in Canada? Is there something to investigate here?

SC: There's definitely something to investigate and certainly we've seen, you know based on the reporting that John Lancaster did, it seems clear that CSIS and the RCMP are planning further interviews with this individual. So, there clearly is some kind of further investigations that are being done, but the question is prosecution. And I think Canadians are reasonable. You know, I think a lot of people are scratching their heads when they hear this story and they're saying, "Well, why isn't this person behind bars? Why isn't this person, you know, in court?".

AMT: Or at least, why are they making an appointment to go talk to him?. They bang on the door for a lot less, do they not?

SC: CSIS cannot, right. I mean CSIS can show up at your workplace, they have, they do. It's been a matter of controversy, but they have no, CSIS has no power to compel. The police.

AMT: But the RCMP does.

SC: Yes so. But you know, the fact is, they clearly know who this guy is and where he is. You probably want to get this person at a time when he's going to talk to you and feel a bit more comfortable in doing so because you want to get as much information out of this individual as they can. If this person feels threatened, then maybe they'll be a little bit less cooperative.

AMT: This does point to the fact that, we have been told there are about 60 such extremist "travelers," that that are back in Canada, having joined either ISIS or something similar. How hamstrung are Canadian officials when it comes to actually proving and doing something about this.

SC: Right. So there's 60 individuals and it's clear, just you know, just get the facts out cause sometimes there's some confusion about this. Those 60 individuals aren't all from the Islamic State. It seems that they're all from all over different countries, so Afghanistan, Pakistan, Yemen Somalia, all over the world. And yes, you're right, we do have a lot of trouble with prosecuting individuals and there's a couple of reasons for that. First, as we discussed at the beginning of this interview, it's very difficult to get accurate intelligence, as to what these individuals did, while they were overseas. And then secondly, it's very hard to turn that intelligence into kind of usable evidence because it would have probably come from a human source that was based overseas and wouldn't be able to come to a Canadian court, even if they wanted to do that in the first place. So there's an intelligence to evidence problem, to be sure for prosecution. The second issue is of course that you know, our current law states that you know, you have to provide material support to a terrorist entity. Membership is not sufficient, in order to be prosecuted. You actually have, we actually have to prove that you've done something and unfortunately a podcast is not enough to do that in this particular case, right, because you know this individual's already changed their story saying, "Look I was under duress. I was just, you know, I was so confused. I was self-medicating with drugs, you know, so that's not going to really hold up in court."

AMT: So, a confession on a tape isn't necessarily good enough.

SC: Right. That's exactly right.

AMT: Now, is there a way, like is our legislation strong enough, does our legislation have enough teeth, in your view?

SC: No. I don't think it does and I think there's more steps the Canadian government could take. An example would be that of Australia, so Australia has actually, what they've done is they've passed legislation, which grants their Minister of Foreign Affairs to declare certain areas as having terrorist entities operating in them and that if one Australian citizen goes there, they actually have to prove that the reason they were there was for, was innocent. So it's, we call it reverse-onus. I'm not a lawyer, I don't want to pretend to be, but that's what it is. So Canada could pass similar legislation, I believe that would allow, basically the minister or a minister to declare a certain area as forbidden and basically forcing Canadians to prove that who do go there, that they were there for innocent purposes. So I think that is one step that definitely could be taken and certainly Prime Minister Stephen Harper, when he was in power, in the 2015 election, he talked about passing legislation along those lines. It was a little bit different because he wanted to exclude certain groups and it's not sure that that would have held up in court, but the fact is, you know, we have looked at these proposals before, but neither the Harper government nor the Trudeau government has recently considered it.

AMT: So both the liberals and Conservatives had opportunities to really dig deep on this and they haven't done it yet?

SC: I would say that's probably the case, yeah, neither government took steps. I mean the Harper government did pass legislation, it was Bill S-7, not the one on barbaric cultural practices, it was an earlier S-7, which basically outlawed travel to the Islamic State or to traveling for the purpose of supporting a terrorist group. So there was that legislation that was passed, but there was nothing that really facilitated prosecuting these individuals who are coming back and today we have this kind of ironic situation where, it's actually easier to prosecute someone in Canada for trying to join ISIS than actually individuals who succeed in going there and then coming back.

AMT: Because you can get them here, but the problem is that there's nothing in their passport that says they were in Syria, either. So obviously yeah, it's harder to prosecute, right?

SC: Yes absolutely. And then on top of that even if you could, you would then have to prove in court that these individuals actually had done something, in some ways had provided material support. It's frustrating because you know, Canada is still kind of new at this and we've had cases, certainly when I was an analyst, we were looking at some of these individuals who were posting Twitter posts saying, "Hey look at me, I'm on a tank." And you know, we even then had questions, why isn't this sufficient evidence that someone did this?

AMT: Well, let me ask you just about risk because we're almost out of time, I mean how do we do risk assessment then, we've just seen in the news this weekend, two separate cases of bombings of ISIS returnees in Indonesia, with their entire families, you know, resorting to violence in the name of this group. How do law enforcement agencies in Canada monitor whether someone who they know has returned, is dangerous?

SC: Right, well chances are we know about them because often they come to the Canadian embassy first because chances are they need some kind of documentation. But when they return, they're definitely interviewed by CSIS and the RCMP. Secondly, they may be referred to one of the Counter Violent Extremism programs that we've seen set up across the country. We know there's centres in Toronto, there's two famous ones in Montreal, Calgary, Edmonton and these programs help to, you know, it's not just the police, it's actually trying to get these people kind of multi-agency support to ensure that they're not returning to violence, right. The key thing is to get them to disengage.

AMT: Right. OK, so before I let you go, what big question do you want answered?

SC: I guess it's really, you know, does the government actually intend to outlaw travel to zones where there are terrorist entities operating because it seems wrong to me that these individuals are coming back and there's not a lot that we can do and we should be prosecuting this because it's you know, maybe these individuals don't actually pose a threat to Canadians here, but they're going overseas with the intention of killing people there.

AMT: OK. Thank you Stephanie Carvin for your insights.

SC: Thank you.

AMT: Stephanie Carvin, former national security analyst with the Canadian government, now an assistant professor of International Relations at Carleton University. She joined us from our Ottawa studio. Let us know what you think. Tweet us @TheCurrentCBC. Find us on Facebook. Go to our website cbc.ca/thecurrent. The news is next and when we return we're talking about the romance novel, guilty pleasure or great books or both? Stay with us.

There's underlying sexism when the romance genre is criticized, novelists

Guests: Mary Bly, Sarah MacLean

AMT: Hello. I'm Anna Maria Tremonti. This is The Current.

[Music: Theme]

AMT: Well, still to come our Project Adaptation is looking for lessons from some of the greatest meltdowns or failures from Three Mile Island to the embarrassment of the Academy Awards presenting the wrong Oscar to the Best Picture. I'll be joined by two people studying best laid plans that go wrong, to tease out their common threads, so we might adapt and avoid more meltdown failures in the future. But first, a love letter to romance novels.

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VOICE: Newly single after a rocky breakup with her self-absorbed fiancé, newspaper columnist, Jessica crashes her car in a lightning storm and soon finds herself dodging bullets in the Wild West. Before the night is out, she's tossed in jail for a murder she didn't commit. And if things don't seem complicated enough, the impossibly handsome sheriff in charge of her arrest, has danger written all over him and a sexy swagger to die for. Jessica knows she needs to get home. But when Sheriff Wades' enticing touch, sets her passions on fire, she begins to wonder if fate has other plans for her. And soon she must choose between the life she longs for in the future and the greatest love she's ever known.

AMT: So what do you think. Does that leave you hot under the collar wanting to read on? The book is, "Taken by the Cowboy," by author Julianne McLean and it is a romance novel, pure and simple. Not necessarily the kind of literature you might be used to hearing on CBC Radio or the kind of book you're used to hearing celebrated by literary types. Which is why the Toronto Public Library has garnered so much attention by saying it wants its new Writer-In-Residence to be a romance writer. We caught up with Denise Drabkin, North York's library services manager, to explain why.

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VOICE: I absolutely don't think that romance writing gets the respect that it deserves. It's undervalued. It's underestimated. It's judged negatively by everybody who doesn't read it. And so what we wanted to do was we wanted to embrace it and publicize it because one should never be judged negatively for whatever one reads or writes. It's a huge industry often overlooked by critics and reviewers. It's a genre where many writers actually get their start, often under pseudonyms, and it's a great way for people to pay it forward and to help encourage would-be writers and that's what Toronto Public Library wants to do. What I find is if you look at romance fiction like in general over the years, you'll see that things have changed and things that are acceptable today might not have been acceptable before. There's possibly a lot fewer doctor-nurse romances now and a lot fewer, sort of management or top dog in a company and their admin assistant. The power structure has changed. Women are often very strong. There are fantasy romances. There's a couple of cowboy romances, there's hockey romances, for example, "Undone By You," is an LGBTQ hockey-romance. Dante Moretti has just landed his dream job, GM of the Chicago Rebels and screw the haters who think there should be an asterisk next to his name because he's the first out managing executive in pro hockey. He's earned the right to be here and nothing will topple him off that perch, especially not an incredibly inconvenient attraction to his star defencemen, Cade "Alamo" Burnett. Cade has always been careful to keep his own desires on the down low,. but his hot Italian boss proves to be a temptation he can't resist. Sure, they both have so much to lose, but no one will ever know. It's very important to remember that we're allowed to read for pleasure and that recreational reading is something that should be encouraged and should not be dismissed or undervalued. I almost call it mental floss. You know, it's a way of sort of relaxing, clearing out the brain and being able to re-enter the world, you know with a more relaxed and easy brain, after you've read one of these. There's no judgment over here.

AMT: Well there may be no judgment over there in Denise Drabkin's North York Library, but there's plenty to be found elsewhere.

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VOICE: Any romance novel that I've ever looked at has been an excruciating ordeal. They're excruciating reading experiences because they're obviously so hastily confected and the writers are clearly talentless, when it comes to prose sentences, when it comes to the sophistication of psychology, the sophistication of emotions, when it comes to having something original and dynamic and intelligent to say about the plight of our species. For anyone who would say, well there are good romance novels and bad romance novels, I'd say please send the good ones my way. I'd be happy to look at them. I doubt you'll be able to do it.

AMT: Well that is writer and memoirist, William Giraldi, from Boston, who is clearly not a devotee of the romance genre.

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VOICE: For me, it doesn't make much sense to spend much time impugning these books as writing because I don't think they were meant to be considered as actual writing, the same way that Twinkie wasn't meant to be considered as actual food. So then the question becomes, why are these books so popular? It's simply that these romance novels provide precisely what empty entertainment has always provided, distraction and escape. And so then you've got to ask from what do millions of these readers need escape? I would say from their humdrum domesticity and their colourless work lives, maybe from the oppressive disappointment in their spouses and their family lives. When you consider how many of these novels are bought and read, it's really a kind of obsession and this obsession, like all obsessions, I think is born of a borderline despair.

AMT: Well, okay then. Ouch. That is William Giraldi. We have two other writers standing by to come to the romance genre's defence, Eloisa James is a New York Times best-selling romance author. Her books have been translated into 28 languages. There are more than six million copies of her work out there in the world and when she is not writing romance, she can be found at Fordham University, where she is a tenured professor of English literature and is known by her real name, Mary Bly. Mary Bly joins us from our studio in New York City. Sarah MacLean is a New York Times best-seller of 11 historical romance novels. Her twelfth, "Wicked and the Wallflower" is due out next month. Sarah MacLean is also a columnist with The Washington Post, where she writes about romance novels and their place in today's gender politics and culture. Sarah MacLean is in Paso Robles, California. Hello to both of you. Welcome.

MARY BLY: Thank you.

AMT: Sarah let's start with you. What were you thinking as you listened to that critique, Twinkie of books.

SARAH MACLEAN: Well to be honest, I was thinking of course, of course this man from Boston, who surely hasn't read a full romance novel, I like that he used the term "looked at," has judged these books harshly. I mean his description of readers was insulting to us, to them. And I think that what's really interesting is it was such a gendered assessment of the genre. There was so much kind of latent, maybe not-so latent misogyny, in the description of the women who read these books, mostly women, though some men and of the things that they can get from these books, the reason why they come into these books, the reason why we write them.

AMT: Mary Bly what do you think?

MB: I would agree with that. I think the misogyny revealed in the fact he talked about domesticity and disappointment with the husband, as if those were the two things that make, sort of the define women's world, says a lot about him and very little about the romance genre.

AMT: So and we are talking about romance as genre fiction, not romantic literature. How are the two different, Mary?

MB: Genre fiction is very different from literature, I mean literature is just a genre and genre fiction is a genre. But when we think of genre fiction, we're really thinking of categories, say the mystery or the romance and those do have different rules around them. They tend to be focused around an internal, sort of a myth or a desire for, for example, a thoughtful, intelligent relationship or in the case of mystery, perfect justice. Right. It will always end with the criminal act being solved, otherwise it doesn't fit within its genre or it fits very uneasily. Science fiction is, you know, the creation of a whole different world, so it's a longing for that sort of originality. I think that people like this William Giraldi, when he's talking about writing and the actual, he said, "I believe that romance writers don't even know, that's not even actual writing," number one, I would say that romance is always judged by the worst of its written, the worst thing written whereas literature is judged by the best. So that's unfortunate, but the second thing is that he, like so many, is really expressing his feelings about women and about a genre that is written by women for women and he's expressing, I'd say far more than latent dislike.

AMT: And I want to talk about that, especially in the era of MeToo, but let's just, a little more about romance genre, when did it begin, it's not really that old, is it Sarah?

SM: Well, we stand on the shoulders of people like Austen and Bronte, for sure, but no, when we talk about romance novels as we think about them in the world, we're really talking about a genre that was birthed in 1972, with a book called, "The Flame and the Flower," by Kathleen Woodiwiss. And that was, at its time, the first time really, ever that anyone had seen an adventure novel with a woman at the centre of it. And it's centered, a character named Heather, who was the main character of the story, it was about her life and her troubles and her challenges and it sees her on multiple continents and it sees her falling in love and it sees her triumphing in a way that we had really never seen an adventure novel centre a woman and centre a woman's importance in the world. That book sold two million copies in the first year, which in 1972 was a banana's amount of copies and it birthed a genre that now is nearly 50 years old and millions of books and hundreds of millions of readers strong.

AMT: This is the disconnect, right, they sell really well and yet there is this criticism that comes from certain areas. Mary Bly, you chose to keep your identity hidden as a writer of this kind of fiction for years, why?

MB: Well I was an assistant professor, so I'm a Shakespeare professor at Fordham University, which happens to be a Jesuit university. So I was very sure and this doesn't actually have quite so much to do with the genre, as it was the way academia is structured in the US, but you really can't hold down two full-time jobs. So that's the general feeling when you're an assistant, you know, it's publish or perish. So I kept it secret, but once I got tenure and I'd hit the New York Times also at that point, I started feeling as if I was, like as if it looked as if I was embarrassed of my readers, as if I was embarrassed of my own books, if I was humiliated by myself in some sense and I was thereby denigrating my readers. So at that point I came out. As it turned out my university has embraced this completely, which makes sense because now they have a writer that they can, you know, show to the students as someone who actually makes money and unlike many poets, is solvent at the end of the day.

AMT: Well and you come from literary royalty. Your father is the poet and essayist, Robert Bly. Your mother, Carole Bly, celebrated writer of short stories and essays. So you've never, you haven't had that judgment growing up.

MB: I have.

AMT: Oh, you have.

MB: My mother used to call my books, "that sex stuff." She never read one. One of the last things she said to me was I was going to write a real book someday. So I have a clear sense of where Giraldi's coming from, I understand that disdain, I think Sarah would agree that we've faced it often because we both are from academic backgrounds and live in New York City. What I've had to realize is that to succumb to that kind of disdain is to really succumb to a dislike of a woman reader because the women who read my books, many of them have, most of them have gone to college, but they read widely, they read everything. Women are the main reader, buyers of books in the United States, so they may read a romance today and they're reading literature tomorrow. This question of obsession that he talks about is not, I mean there is a percent of readers who only read romance, but the majority of them read very, very widely. They are readers, above all.

MB: So Sarah talk to us a little bit about because you've made it really clear that you have a lot of feminist cred, you too are of you know, an Ivy League background, how do you square that that kind of criticism that belittles the women and doesn't recognize feminism in these books?.

SM: Well first I would say that it's unlikely that people who come at me or come across with this criticism, have actually sat down and read a collection of romance novels. I think that as Mary said, there is no question that romance is often judged on its worst, but there are thousands and hundreds of thousands of romance novels that tell the story of a woman in the world triumphing. And I think that what's really interesting is that in almost all other literature, genre or otherwise, women and marginalized people are put on the page to suffer and die and be martyred and be vehicles by which someone else is heroic. And in romance, these people are put on the page, women, marginalized people, they're put on the page to triumph and to win and to have hope and passion and partnership and yes, love. And there's nothing, there's nothing sad or pathetic about wanting happiness and a happily ever after. And when we centre these kinds of fantasies and these kinds of ideas, they're incredibly powerful because when all women have seen for millennia in literature and in storytelling is, women as pain or women in pain, seeing us in triumph is a really compelling, powerful concept.

AMT: And have you had to change or do you see change since the MeToo movement?

SM: I don't think that many of us have changed much, since the MeToo the movement. Since the very beginning, consent has been on the page for romance novelists. And I think that's the remarkable thing about these books is women have had to deal with assault and had to deal with pain and had to deal with misogyny and hate for so long that of course, a genre written largely by women, largely for women, largely about women is about this idea of consent and centres this idea of women having agency over their own body, over their own partnership, over their own sexual identity and sexual experiences. So for me, I think all it's done is made me lean in, be a little more overt, but it's certainly for the genre, there's nothing new about putting consent on the page.

AMT: I have another clip I'd like you guys to hear. Our producer in Halifax, Mary-Catherine McIntosh, met with a voracious reader of romance fiction. She is not at all bothered by what people think of her choice of books and listen to what we've got of her talking about this:.

SOUNDCLIP

VOICE 1: My name is Lynne Colter and I love reading romance. I was out shopping at a yard sale and they had a box of books and I started picking through them and the woman says, "Well, you know, you can have the whole box for whatever." I said sure, handed her the money and walked away. Well the box was entirely full of romances. And I was pregnant and I had a lot of stress going on and I needed escapism and I just devoured them. And that was, that started my love affair with Harlequin and I've not stopped since. And I read a lot. I read at least 300 books a year. There's just lots and lots of good books to be read. I will read anything from sweet romance with the bedroom door closed, to hardcore erotica. Are you OK? A deep voice asked, as he anchored her body to his. She took one look into the most gorgeous pair of blue eyes she had ever seen and knew in an instant that she was not okay. In fact, she might never be okay again. Before she even realized what was happening he fished her out again and threw her over his shoulders. The movement forced the water from her lungs, as he carried her to the shore. He laid her out on the ground and tilted her head back, a second later his mouth was on hers. Bursts of warm air filled her lungs, but she couldn't think about that right now. No, right now all she could think about was how hot his lips felt, how his mouth tasted like beer and cinnamon and everything nice. Unable to stop herself, she moaned, her nipples tightening as she wrapped her hands around his head. I'm going to have to read that whole book.

VOICE 2: Does it just suck you in?

VOICE 1: It does. It really does. When I'm reading on my lunch hour, I often have to set a timer, so that I know to go back to work. I've worked here for 18 years and when I started, you didn't have e-book readers. I've always had a print book with me and you know, you look at the cover, you know what Lynne's reading. I read mostly e-books now, just mainly for the convenience that you never have to worry about finishing the book when you've got it in your purse. But I've never had any concern about walking around with a romance book in my hands.

VOICE 2: Never?

VOICE 1: Never. It's nobody's business what you're reading, first of all and their escapism. With a romance novel, you know you're going to have a happy ever after. Am I'm reading to relax and unwind and to be pleasured. So why do you, why is there expectation that a woman reading a romance is expecting that to happen in her real life? If I was reading a historical novel, nobody would withhold that against me. So there's a romance element in the story, what difference does it make?

AMT: Okay Lynne Colter, 300 books a year and she says right up front, it's escapism and pleasure and why would she be judged, when you're not judging the readers of other books about wanting to escape into the world of whatever book they have. What do you think Sarah MacLean?

SM: First of all, I love Lynne and I want her to come be my friend and so we can talk about romance novels all the time. She's absolutely right and Mr. Giraldi points it out that and he said it was such disdain, that these books are about pleasure and they're about entertainment, and my question I wish he were here because I would ask him what's so wrong about that. Why should we not enjoy the things we read? Why should we judge them for being pleasurable, for being able to sit down and read a book in six hours, simply because you can't put it down. That's a delicious experience and anyone who's ever read a novel that way, knows that it's deeply rewarding and Lynne surely knows that. I would also say that Lynne is, there is nothing different about Lynne than there is about many, many, many other romance readers. Most romance readers read far more than other readers, they read on average 10 to 12 books a month. Lynne is one of the many, who reads almost a book a day and I think this is a powerful experience and I also think that Lynne's comment about feeling as though the books weren't setting high expectations for her or that she's concerned about people believing that these books were setting unrealistic expectations. That's a word, a phrase we hear a lot in romance, is something that I hear a lot from readers and it always a little bit disappoints me because what it says to me is that, in some way partnership, happiness, love, an experience with a partner who makes you feel seen and feel heard and also gives you immense pleasure, should be unrealistic in some way.

AMT: OK so let's let Mary, before we run out of time, that's a good point, Mary Bly you want to pick up on that? We're almost out of time.

MB: OK. I would say that it's not unrealistic what is described as Sarah is saying, but I would also say that these books, like a Shakespeare play right, they are teaching as you read. So you're reading that many, you are actually learning and what you're learning is that you have the right to this, that every woman has the right to someone who's thoughtful and non-abusive and respectful. And these books teach that. They're not just escape, they also teach.

AMT: We have to leave it there. Thank you both for your thoughts on all of this.

MB: Thank you.

SM: Thank you.

MB: Thank you for having us.

SM: Thank you for having us.

AMT: Mary Bly is a professor of English literature at Fordham University, who writes romance novels under the pseudonym Eloisa James. She joined us from New York City. Sarah MacLean is a best-selling author of romance novels and a columnist with The Washington Post. We reached her in California. Your turn, are romance novels your guilty pleasure or maybe they're your proud pleasure. Let us know. Do you find them excruciating as our critic did? Tweet us @TheCurrentCBC. Find us on Facebook. Go to our website cbc.ca/thecurrent and click on the contact link. And stay with us, in our next half hour, we're talking about meltdowns, the failures that occur when everyone thought that everything was looked at and there couldn't possibly be a failure. I'm Anna Maria Tremonti. This is The Current.

[Music: Theme]

From Thanksgiving dinners to nuclear meltdowns, why complex systems are often doomed to fail

Guests: Chris Clearfield, Andras Tilscik

AMT: I'm Anna Maria Tremonti and you're listening to The Current.

SOUNDCLIP

VOICE 1: Adaptation.

VOICE 2: Good evening. The people around Harrisburg, Pennsylvania on the Three Mile Island nuclear plant, were told they can sleep in their own homes tonight. Engineers and scientists are working to solve the problems inside the containment building, where the nuclear reactor core is overheated. While a meltdown is still considered a possibility, officials say there is no imminent danger.

AMT: Well, it could have been worse. On March 28th of 1979, a relatively minor problem in one of the cooling units, led to an accident at Three Mile Island nuclear plant in the United States. In the end, only a small amount of radioactivity was released.

SOUNDCLIP

VOICE: There is no imminent danger. That's the official advice tonight, but many people aren't buying it. Thousands have packed their luggage and they've left. Banks report many withdrawals. People are afraid of what they can't see, radiation. And they've heard so much contradictory technical jargon from officials that the first casualty of this accident may have been trust.

AMT: That's a report from ABC News at the time, just days after the accident. It was seen as a near disaster caused by one relatively small malfunction. That one malfunction led to a series of decisions and events that resulted in what our next guest referred to as "catastrophic system failure." In their new book, Chris Clearfield and Andras Tilscik look at why these kinds of failures occur. Chris Clearfield is a former derivatives trader, he's now a licensed pilot. Both fields where small mistakes, can have catastrophic consequences. Andras Tilscik is a business professor at the University of Toronto. He teaches a course on organizational failure. They've come together to write, "Meltdown: Why our Systems Fail and What We Can Do About It." It goes beyond that Three Mile Island example to look at other examples, such as the Enron bankruptcy, the Deepwater Horizon oil rig disaster, to pinpoint what those events have in common. As part of our yearlong project, Adaptation, they're with me to talk about how our systems can and should adapt to avoid failure. Chris Clearfield is in Seattle. Andras Tilscik is here with me in Toronto. Hello to both of you.

ANDRAS TILSCIK: Thanks for having us.

CHRIS CLEARFIELD: Yeah, thanks for having us.

AMT: Well Chris, I'm going to start with you. We heard some of the reporting about the Three Mile Island accident. What does it tell us about what causes systems to fail?

CC: Three Mile Island was a really interesting accident in a lot of ways. I mean the failures of Three Mile Island, like you said, there were really a series of small things that came together to cause this massive failure, to cause this meltdown. And what we saw in Three Mile Island was it was, you know, something like a stuck valve or sort of water getting into the wrong part of the plant systems and then operators not responding in the right way, being confused by the indications they saw in the control room and things like that. And really, the details of Three Mile Island, I mean the report was great that you lead with because you know, two days after, even a couple months after, people didn't really understand what had happened and it really wasn't until a really kind of big engineering investigation took place, where they understood the specific causes and you know the official conclusion of the accident investigation was that it was operator error. But there was a sociologist who was involved, who was looking at this investigation from a slightly different perspective. His name was Chick Perrow and what he saw was that, you know it was really unfair to blame the operators because the details of the accident weren't understood until you know, nine months of investigation later, so how could the operators have possibly understood it. And what Chick Perrow saw when he looked back at the accident, was that you know it wasn't a big external shock that caused this failure. It was this series of kind of small problems that really snowballed into this nuclear meltdown and what Perrow did with that is he really started looking at systems more broadly and started trying to understand what kind of systems were vulnerable to this type of failure.

AMT: And in fact, you call him Chick, it was Charles Perrow, I guess officially, but Andras let's pick up on that because you guys say he revolutionized the science of catastrophic failure. Tell me more about what he came to believe and see.

AT: Yeah he really did. So what Chick did after discovering this first pattern that he saw at Three Mile Island, he went on and tried to dig into a lot of other accidents and one of the things he discovered was that there really is this sort of formula. And the two parts of that formula that he saw were: complexity and what he calls tight coupling. So complexity just means that the system is more like an elaborate web, rather than a kind of linear process. It's something that we can directly peek into, it has a lot of intricately connected parts and when he says tight coupling, he really just means that the system doesn't have a lot of slack in it. It's not a very forgiving system. Once the genie is out of the bottle, it's hard to put it back in. It's hard to fix problems as they arise. And he argues that when you have both of these factors in place, you are what we might call, the danger zone. It's this place where we get confused by the small errors and it can easily snowball into something much bigger and because the system is not very forgiving we have a lot of trouble identifying the problem in real time and fixing it in real time.

AMT: Well I want to take you through some of the examples that you guys identify, but Chris let's start with one that we can all identify with. According to this theory, even something like Thanksgiving dinner is an example of a tightly coupled complex system, vulnerable to failure. Take me through that one.

CC: Right. So as we were, you know, as we were deep enmeshed in the research of the book, we started to see these kind of things everywhere and we really started to think about almost everything is a system. And you know Thanksgiving dinner in particular, I mean I don't know if you've ever experienced a Thanksgiving dinner disaster, I know I certainly have.

AMT: I'm such a great cook, I don't know, keep going though.

CC: Right. So if you think about Thanksgiving dinner, you know so much stuff has to go right and it all has to go right kind of at the same time. I mean first of all, there's the holiday itself, right. I mean it's one day and everybody celebrates it, you know, on the same day in their respective countries and so all of the travel is kind of geared toward getting to the dinner on that day. And then there's the dinner itself, you know the turkey has to cook before you can make the gravy and you know there's stuffing and the stuffing has to go inside the turkey and so you have all of these connections that just don't happen when you have a simpler meal like spaghetti and meatballs, where you can sort of you know even let the meat sauce putter for a while on the stove. So I mean, I've had the experience where you know we planned on sitting down at three-thirty for Thanksgiving and it didn't come until you know six-thirty, seven because the failures build on themselves, much as we see in Three Mile Island.

AMT: And there's only one oven, unless you got like a special kitchen.

CC: Yeah, exactly.

AMT: So some things are going to be cold, some things are going to be raw.

CC: Yeah exactly. Exactly.

AMT: OK, now let's go to something that we can all remember that is even more serious than a Thanksgiving dinner, the Deepwater Horizon disaster. Largest marine oil spill in the history of the petroleum industry, 11 people killed. In some ways, BP, the company that owned the oil rig, was very safety conscious. The workers on the rig even made a rap video about the safety. Listen:.

SOUNDCLIP

Sample from BP safety rap video.

AMT: OK. Andras Tilscik, what was wrong with BP's safety system, the company had placed such a premium on safety, what happened?

AT: It's really interesting, right. It's easy for us to think that BP and its contractors didn't have a safety culture. Well we just heard a rap video about safety, but it turns out that BP and its contractors were very consistently focused on one aspect of safety and that the sort of small straightforward relatively simple failures, things like someone slipping, someone having their hand injured and these things matter, of course worker safety is important, but at the same time, there wasn't the same kind of strong focus on system safety. They didn't think about the big picture in many, many ways. One analyst put it this way, they said you know, it almost seemed like they were more worried about coffee spills than about oil spills. They had very rigorous procedures for how you should be walking around with your coffee cup, but not equally rigorous procedures for how you might do a critical test to make sure that you don't experience a blowout.

AMT: And in fact, they did have a blowout and it comes down to what was happening at the borehole, the cement casings, the valves, a whole bunch of mechanical problems at the borehole, under the water.

AT: Exactly and we see this pattern of complexity and tight coupling, over and over again. It's a very complex system on Deepwater. You can't directly peek into it, we can't send someone down, miles and miles down the ocean and the Earth, to look at what's going on with the oil and it's also very tightly coupled. It's really unforgiving, once the oil is is out, you can't really put it back.

AMT: You say, that in general, features designed to enhance safety can actually reduce safety. Why is that?

AT: Yes, absolutely. So one example of that is the Oscars, the Academy Awards last year in 2017.

AMT: And we have a clip of that if you want to bring that up because we just happen to have a clip of that because it's in your book. Let's listen:.

SOUNDCLIP

Clip from Academy Awards announcing the wrong Best Picture.

AMT: OK. What happened?

AT: So one of the very interesting aspects of that accident, is that the reason why there was a wrong envelope, the reason why there was the wrong to read in the first place, is that they had a safety system. The accounting firm that was in charge of the process, they wanted to make sure that there were two briefcases with identical envelopes, just in case one of the accountants got stuck in traffic or one of the envelopes gets lost on the way. And so they had essentially, a set of backup envelopes, a safety system, a safety feature, but as a result of adding more complexity to the system, which is what the safety system did, there was this extra envelope, which was then picked up and then the wrong movie was announced. And this is something that we see quite often, in all sorts of different contexts, that our first instinct in the wake of a failure, is to add more safety systems, it's just to add more and more and more layers, which is a very understandable human instinct, but often those layers themselves, add more complexity. And then later on it's those things that end up confusing us.

AMT: Interesting. So Chris, you also argue though that modern systems are also more vulnerable to bad actors, people who want to exploit the weaknesses of the system. Can you give us an example?

CC: Yeah, that was a really interesting kind of direction that the research took us that we didn't really expect, but if you think about the things that cause these opportunities for failure in complex systems, you know it's really things being hidden away, it's things not you know being opaque, not rising to the surface and being hard to understand and in many of the systems that we looked at, that also allowed the opportunity for wrongdoing. And we have a couple of examples in the book, my favorite one is the Volkswagen Dieselgate scandal. You know, Volkswagen put what the regulators call a defeat device in their cars to make this, you know this so-called clean diesel technology, be clean and fuel-efficient and things like that and of course, what the regulators eventually discovered after you know really years of doing research on it, is that those cars were not clean diesel cars. They were pretty dirty diesel cars, but they were set up so that when they could detect that they were being run under the kind of official testing regimes, the official emissions testing regimes, they would run as if they were fuel-efficient and you know, not have a lot of noxious combustion by-products. But what's really interesting about it is, even the freezing that the regulators uses is kind of misleading, you know, for me the word defeat device, that makes me think something bolted onto the engine, but this was really in the computer code of the cars. You know, it wasn't like something was bolted on the engines, you could pop the hood and take a look and be like "oh that's the defeat device," it was really hidden in the complexity of the cars and that really facilitated, that really enabled that wrongdoing at a massive scale. And you know, one of the angles that we look at that story from, is the fact that Volkswagen is a very insular company and they have a very idiosyncratic governance structure, you know compared to most large publicly traded companies. There is not a lot of diversity in the backgrounds of the people that are making these big decisions. There's not a lot of outsiders there.

AMT: Andras, you used the Fukushima disaster in Japan, the nuclear power plant, as an example of predicting the possibility of catastrophic failure. Take us through that story. What went wrong there?

AT: Fukushima is very interesting in that we often think that it might have been inevitable, that there was this big external shock that the earthquake and tsunami and there was not much we could have done, but there was actually a plant that was very similar to Fukushima, not too far from Fukushima, in fact it was closer to the epicentre of the earthquake that was hit by waves just as tall, just as powerful as Fukushima itself and yet that particular plant survived. In fact, some people reported that that was the safest place for them to go during the tsunami. And one thing that that plant did differently, was that in advance of the tsunami, well years before that, they had built taller sea walls to protect themselves. And for us that was really interesting in that, you know we often have to make judgments like that in all kinds of realms, whether we are we are trying to decide how early do I need to leave for the airport to make my flight or how should my sea wall need to be to resist or withstand the power of a tsunami. We make those kinds of judgments all the time and what the research shows is that we tend to be awfully overconfident about our predictions around it. The good news is that cognitive scientists have been working on a number of little interventions that we can use, that help reduce that kind of overconfidence.

AMT: And talk to us a little bit more about that, so how do we do that?

AT: One method that we've seen and there's a lot of research backing this up, is something called the pre-mortem method, which is really a simple technique which just involves imagining that a failure has already happened and then thinking about the risks or defectors that might have led to it, which is very different from the way we usually think about risk. We usually sit down and think what could go wrong, what might go wrong? Here, we imagine that something has already gone wrong and then we work backwards. In organizations we usually get to show that we are smart, by talking about how things might work out, how we might solve a problem. This method helps us, it really changes the social dynamics. It empowers people to talk about concerns and risks that they are thinking about.

AMT: And Chris, you're a licensed commercial pilot. The aviation industry looks at this, does it not?

CC: Yeah, I mean the aviation industry is really a great example of an industry that has throughout the years, changed its approach pretty substantively. I mean even if that's gotten more complex and even as it's added more technology, that hasn't necessarily made it safer, but a big part of what has made it safer is how it approaches the fact that it really is a complex system. Aviation as an industry, really obsessively pays attention to small failures, before they become big ones and so pilots, air traffic controllers, you know ground crews, really everybody involved in the process, is given an opportunity to self report any problems that they see and it's done in a way that there's not a tendency to go after people that have made these mistakes, but instead the industry as a whole tries to learn from them and that among other things is one of the things that's made aviation safer than ever before. And I think it's an example of this kind of bigger theme that runs throughout the book. And I know we've talked about a lot of failures, but really, we think of "Meltdown" as a very optimistic book. And you know I think the bigger theme for us is if we look at even some of the examples that we've talked about, from Deepwater Horizon to the Oscars and Fukushima, I mean what needs to change is our approach to these things. Aviation is one of the fields where that change has really happened and we see the consequences and they're very positive.

AMT: And so you're arguing that when people like outside of a hierarchy, if you have, if there's a protocol, a corporate protocol that allows everyone to speak up, someone who you might not expect, can speak up and point to the little problem that could end up being the big problem.

CC: Yes, that's exactly it. I mean in complex systems, you know it's not that the people at the top of the hierarchy are the ones that, they're usually the ones furthest from the operations, furthest from the details of what's going on and so it's really important that people who notice these problems are able to speak up and share their insights so that the whole system can change.

AMT: You guys have a couple of medical examples in the book about how this works and one of the areas you look at is the role of intuition and you write about Canadian doctors, who actually helped their profession, to stop relying on intuition. What's that story Andras?

AT: Yeah so this is the story of the Ottawa ankle protocol, which I was unfortunate enough to experience after getting injured and slipping on an icy road in Toronto, a couple of years ago and this is how I actually learned about this. So this is a very interesting case where, for a long time if you went to your doctor or went to the emergency room with an ankle injury, doctors would usually send you to get an X-ray and we spent a lot of money on X-rays, we expose people to radiation that was unnecessary because it turns out most people did not have a fracture. But doctors relied on their intuition to figure out what was, whether they did or did not and they were pretty bad at it. They often paid attention to things like swelling, which it turns out is not really a good predictor and a few Canadian doctors, after a while, figured out that there's a lot of data that they can look at and identify the factors that allow us to predict which injuries warrant an X-ray and which ones don't. And they came up with this great protocol, which is very simple, it involves four questions, things like, "Could you stand up on it right away?" and that helps doctors figure out who needs to have an X-ray and who doesn't and it works really well. It eliminated a lot of unnecessary X-rays and yet people who do need an X-ray, who are likely to have a fracture, are still probably going to end up being sent to have an X-ray.

AMT: It's interesting because some of the things you point to, seems so simple when they're explained after the fact, but it takes people to speak up and to change the sort of the status quo.

AT: Absolutely. I think, you know, one of the other themes of this book is that, it is very optimistic, we see a lot of solutions that work and those solutions are really within our reach and this is really why we wanted to write this book, is that the things we need to do to adapt to these complex systems, don't require that we are a CEO and have millions and millions of dollars in our budget, we can, all of us can make a difference. And yet even notice the solutions seem simple, they are not easy, they often go against our natural instincts. We like to rely on our intuition. If somebody raises concerns or criticizes us, we don't like to hear that, we don't love to deal with dissent. So these things end up being simple, but they are not easy for teams and organizations to use them.

AMT: So as technology makes our organizations and our systems, our nuclear plants, even our homes more and more complex, does the potential for failure increase?

CC: Absolutely. And I think that's what we're seeing with, you know, that's what we're seeing with a lot of these stories, but we can also see it as you said, in our homes. We as consumers, we're inviting all of these devices into our homes in many cases, you know from the Google Smart Home to Amazon Alexa, things like that, but you know the other place where this really shows up is in our cars and we don't always get to make that choice in our cars. You know I have a I have a 2016 Subaru, it's a pretty middle-of-the-road car, I would say and yet, you know I can look up stock prices on my dashboard and I don't know why I can do that. I don't know who thought that that was a good idea, but you know the consequence of that is that that car is now connected to the internet. And you know, what we see kind of over and over again, is that increasing connectivity, really it increases complexity and it increases you know networking things really, increases the ability for things to go wrong and in particular, in cars, you know we had this great example of two hackers, they were really, they were security researchers, so they were kind of on the good guys side, but they figured out how to take control of a Jeep Cherokee on the road and you know turn off its transmission and mess with its brakes and steering and things like that. And you know, they went to Chrysler with it, Chrysler issued a recall and fixed the cars, but that's sort of terrifying, the fact that we aren't, we don't even always have the choice to kind of opt out of this complexity anymore.

AMT: So what do we need to ask ourselves, as we move into a new area, whether it be a new piece of technology, I mean you're using so many examples here from something very tangible like a new piece of technology to maybe a change in lifestyle or something. What do we need to ask ourselves to make sure that we do a little pre-mortem?

CC: Well actually, that's I mean you hit the nail in the head, I mean the pre-mortem is one of the things we can do and we actually interviewed somebody who used the pre-mortem technique before she decided to take a new job and she used the pre-mortem to help herself kind of outline what the possible failures, if she took this new job where and how she should think about it. So you know, I think more and more, as we did the research for this book, we expected to write about Deepwater Horizon and you know the financial crisis and Three Mile Island and things like that, but more and more as we did the research, what we found is we were also writing about things that affect all of us, from somebody who's deciding to buy their first home to you know how we just manage our daily lives. I'll give you an example from my own life. I have a five-year-old and as we were doing the research for the book, you know I started to realize that my trying to get my five-year-old ready for preschool, that actually looked a lot like a crisis every day.

AMT: That is crisis everyday, but keep going.

CC: Right. No exactly, and I think a lot of us have that feeling. But what I was able to do is you know take some of the lessons that emergency room teams and SWAT teams use when they think about crises and start applying it. So what we've started to do, as a family, is every week we have a pretty short meeting, where we really ask three questions, I mean we're talking five minutes here because it's a five-year-old. And so the three questions are, you know what went well last week, what didn't go well and what can we try next week? And what that means is that you know, we're not stuck facing the same problems over and over, we figure out that we've spent a ton of time looking for our coat in the morning, so what we're going to do from now on is bring our coat downstairs the night before. And I mean that's a great example of I think, how we need to start to approach our systems much more broadly and that can help us at home, as well as helping us at work when we start a new project.

AMT: Gentlemen, we have to leave it there, but thanks for all your insights and all your ideas.

AT: Thank you.

CC: Thank you. This was really great.

AMT: Chris Clearfield and Andrew Tilscik are the authors of "Meltdown: How our Systems Fail and What We Can Do About It." That's our program for today. Stay with Radio One for Q. Tom Power welcomes Ghanian-Canadian musician Kae Sun for a live performance. Now after our discussion about romance novels earlier, we're ending off with a little bit of a cult-favourite podcast. Jamie Morton is a British television writer and director. When he discovered his father had taken up writing erotic fiction, he knew what he had to do. He started a podcast called. "My Dad Wrote a Porno," in which he and some of his friends share one new chapter per episode and have a lot of fun doing it. We'll leave you with a bit from episode one. I'm Anna Maria Tremonti. Thanks for listening to The Current.

SOUNDCLIP

A clip of Episode 1 from the podcast, "My Dad Wrote a Porno."

May 14, 2018 episode transcript

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