Week 6: Borrowing a method that wasn't built for restaurants

Week 6 — plane-crash investigation, product post-mortems and clinical autopsy, and what a restaurant closure can borrow from each.

31 August 2026

What this covers#

None of the professions that formalised post-mortem analysis were thinking about restaurants. Aviation investigators build a timeline before a theory, on purpose, because a first theory that arrives early captures every investigator who hears it. Product post-mortems separate the proximate cause from the five things that had to go wrong first for it to matter. Clinical autopsy distinguishes what killed the patient from what merely happened to be true at time of death.

What it sets up#

The rest of the semester borrows the timeline-before-theory discipline directly, and the proximate-versus-contributing distinction is the same one week 11 asks you to make when ranking your own findings into a verdict.