Go Fever Organizational Risk / 硬干狂热

Definition

Go fever is an organizational escalation pattern in which accumulated investment, public commitment, schedule pressure, and prior momentum make continuing feel safer or more legitimate than pausing, even when unresolved warnings are multiplying.

Current Synthesis

In 502 宇宙超级工程是如何垮掉的：刘怡谈「挑战者号」事故四十周年, Challenger is the central case. NASA and its contractors had reasons to protect a promised launch cadence and public mission narrative, while engineers lacked a sufficiently authoritative path from uncertainty to a stop decision. Go fever converts those conditions into action bias: prior success and investment narrow the perceived option set until delay is misread as institutional failure rather than safety control.

Key Claims

• Sunk investment can make stopping feel more costly even though it cannot reduce the underlying technical risk.
• Public schedules and promotional commitments can turn an engineering decision into a reputational test.
• Repeated partial anomalies can be normalized when earlier missions avoided catastrophe.
• Warning systems fail when engineers must prove an exact failure threshold before decision-makers will pause.
• A credible stop rule must assign authority, evidence thresholds, and consequences before schedule pressure peaks.
• Post-accident component fixes are insufficient if cadence, incentives, communication, and decision rights remain unchanged.

Evidence

Commitment and schedule pressure

• 502 宇宙超级工程是如何垮掉的：刘怡谈「挑战者号」事故四十周年 connects Challenger’s launch to prior investment, promised launch frequency, mission windows, and public messaging.

Warning-to-decision failure

• 502 宇宙超级工程是如何垮掉的：刘怡谈「挑战者号」事故四十周年 describes low-temperature seal warnings and ice concerns that did not receive controlling weight because uncertainty was treated as insufficient proof of failure.

Systemic rather than component-only correction

• 502 宇宙超级工程是如何垮掉的：刘怡谈「挑战者号」事故四十周年 uses the later Columbia disaster to argue that replacing or inspecting one component does not automatically repair the institutional pattern.

Counterevidence & Qualifications

• Proceeding under uncertainty is not automatically go fever; complex missions cannot eliminate all risk before action.
• A delay can itself carry safety, financial, or mission costs, so the concept does not make stopping universally correct.
• The source does not quantify how much each political, publicity, contractor, or schedule factor changed the final launch decision.
• “Go fever” is an interpretive organizational label, not a substitute for reconstructing the actual decision chain and technical evidence.

What Changed

• Created the concept from the Challenger episode’s synthesis of commitment escalation and suppressed stopping decisions.

Related Concepts

• 沉没成本困局 / Sunk Cost Entrapment - prior investment can distort evaluation of whether to continue.
• Catastrophic Failure Root-Cause Investigation - reconstructs the technical and organizational chain after failure.
• CAPA / Corrective and Preventive Action - turns causal findings into correction and prevention.
• Apollo Mission Risk Discipline - contrasting practice of contingency, staged testing, and explicit task-level risk.
• Megaproject Success Conditions / 超级工程成功条件 - upstream political, financial, and objective conditions that can reduce escalation pressure.
• Large Company Organizational Inertia - broader tendency for institutional momentum and incentives to resist redirection.