If I were a betting person, my guess is they have created a culture of “schedule first”. Other orgs managed by engineers have been chastised for this in the past (looking at you, NASA). The problem is the risk/reward is asymmetrical managing these projects. Even though the severity can be extremely high, the probabilities of an error of this magnitude tend to be very small. This creates an incentive for ambitious souls to be aggressive and continually role the dice to meet schedule. As a former manager once told me when I was in a safety role, “you don’t want to get a reputation for slowing things down.”
To oversimplify things, say there’s a 1% chance any project can end in disaster. You can literally create an entire career ignoring that risk and still look like a star. Probability is on the individuals side. Meanwhile, the manager pushing to do things the right way to minimize that risk almost certainly will bear a higher cost/schedule burden. But in aggregate, that probability will catch up to the organization.
What makes me think this? There’s ample reporting Boeing didn’t follow their own procedures because they didn’t want to delay. Hazard analysis documentation wasn’t reflective of the design because the paperwork wasn’t getting updated. Their didn’t follow their own procedures regarding redundancy in design of items identified in the HA. I suspect they knew this was wrong which is why they obfuscated details in the investigation.
Culture matters, irrespective of academic degrees.