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Small Things, Big Falls: How Ignored Warnings Become Catastrophes - in Cockpits, Marriages, and Boardrooms
Paperback
Publisher: Independently Published
Published: Jul 17 2026
Pages: 152
Weight: 0.47
Height: 0.33 Width: 6.00 Depth: 9.00
Language: English
A cracking ceiling, watched and measured for months before a department store collapsed and killed five hundred people. Thirty-one separate regulatory warnings, issued to a bank that failed anyway. A padlock, missing from a safety switch, that no one in the entire supply chain understood was the only thing standing between an oil depot and an explosion heard across two countries.
Small Things, Big Falls takes you inside eighteen real, meticulously documented disasters - in the sky, at sea, on construction sites, in boardrooms, and in a Bangladeshi garment factory - to answer a question that matters far beyond any single industry: why do intelligent, capable people and organizations see a warning clearly, and still fail to act on it in time?
Drawing on official investigation reports, court records, and firsthand testimony, humanitarian professional and author Steven Ssamba walks through the exact mechanisms that turn a small, ignored signal into an irreversible collapse - from the normalization of deviance that destroyed two space shuttles seventeen years apart, to the diffusion of responsibility that let a two-hundred-billion-dollar bank fail in thirty-six hours.
But this is not simply a book about disasters. Each chapter pairs its historical case with an unflinching personal reflection - on marriage, fatherhood, and a career spent inside humanitarian crises - showing that the same small, dismissed warning signs operating inside a cockpit or a boardroom are quietly at work at your own dinner table.
You will learn: - Why warnings are so rarely ignored through malice, and so often lost through drift, assumption, and normalization - The critical difference between a failure caused by arrogance and one caused by an honest gap in understanding - and why telling them apart changes what you should actually do about it - A simple, three-question framework, used throughout the book, for catching a small warning sign in your own life before it becomes the thing you wish you had caught sooner
Whether you lead a team, run a household, or simply want to understand why the news keeps reporting disasters that everyone saw coming, Small Things, Big Falls will change how closely you listen to the quiet things - long before you ever need to.
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