The Leaning Tower of Pisa

Several years ago, my wife and two of our adult children (I think they had just graduated from college) traveled to Spain, France, and Italy on a cruise around the Mediterranean Sea.  I have a lot of great memories from that trip.  We visited the famous "Leaning Tower of Pisa" on one of our excursions (see my failed attempt at making one of those "forced perspective" Tower shots below).  It's a stunningly beautiful building, but if I were to be 100% honest, I doubt we would have visited it if the tower hadn't been so famous for the fact that it was leaning.  

The Tower of Pisa, as it is more simply known, is actually one of three structures in Pisa's Cathedral Square (Piazza del Duomo), which includes the cathedral and Pisa Baptistry.  The tower began to lean during its construction in the 12th century, largely due to the fact that the area's soft ground could not support the tower's weight.  The "lean" became progressively worse during construction, which wasn't completed until the 14th century (see my post "Cathedral Thinking").  The "lean" reached a five-and-half degree tilt in 1990, but thanks to modern engineering from about 1993 to 2001, the tilt has been stabilized to just under four degrees.

Today, this leaning tower has become one of the most visited tourist attractions in the world, receiving over 5 million visitors every year.  The irony that a colossal blunder of engineering has become a world famous tourist attraction is not lost on me.  A few months ago, "Reliability 4 Life" posted on LinkedIn and compared the Leaning Tower of Pisa to High Reliability Organizations - well, not exactly in the way that you would think.  The post claimed that the reason why the tower ended up with a four degree lean was that they tried to build it on a poor foundation.  Soft, sandy, swampy ground does not make for a good foundation.  In the same way, a High Reliability Organization's foundation is its safety culture.  Strengthen the foundation and you strengthen the reliability of the organization.  It's a great analogy, and I fully agree with the concept.

I think there is another lesson to be learned here, and that is this: Sometimes our greatest failures can go on to be our greatest successes.  There's no question in my mind that the engineers who built the Tower of Pisa never planned for it to lean.  I can only imagine what they were thinking if they had been able to see the finished product, which admittedly was probably cast as a colossal failure.  But I can't help think that there's likely no way that the Tower of Pisa would have become such a modern icon had it not been for the fact that it started to lean.  Failure is never the end.  Sometimes we can end up with a success, even when things don't always go according to plan.