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A lot of the problematic behavior described here can be seen as examples of people optimizing for the most common/most likely scenario, and ignoring the potentially very large costs of unlikely but possible scenarios.

Nassim Taleb has written extensively about this subject (and the converse, where people fail to account for potentially very large rewards of unlikely but possible scenarios):

http://www.fooledbyrandomness.com/

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Relatedly, what about the idea that people move to their own personal risk tolerance, which may not be aligned with the company's? For instance, I might figure that a shortcut to get my component completed will have a 1% risk of destroying the project and getting me fired. That's acceptable to me, so I do it. But if there are multiple people in similar positions, each creating critical components, and making the same decision, all of a sudden the project is very likely to fail.

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