Boeing 737 MAX: The Cost of Organisational Silence

This working paper examines how organisational silence at Boeing's management and engineering levels directly contributed to the 737 MAX crashes. Drawing on investigative reports, congressional testimony, and safety audits, the paper analyses the institutional mechanisms that suppressed safety concerns — including production pressure, hierarchical intimidation, and a culture that penalised dissent. The study documents how key engineers and safety officers were systematically silenced or ignored, and how leadership communication failure created the conditions for two fatal accidents that killed 346 people. The paper argues that the Boeing case is not an anomaly but a predictable outcome of organisations that mistake silence for consensus. It offers a framework for identifying and disrupting the structural preconditions of organisational silence in high-stakes industrial environments.