Error-Free® Analyxer Expert Alliance
From crisis response to crisis prevention
Dr. Chong Chiu spent years going to the accident. This home is for the work that comes before the next one: seeing a human error, or an equipment failure, while there is still time to act.
A short film of this story will be placed here.
The pen and the one-way ticket
In 1974 he finished nuclear engineering at National Tsing Hua University. He had entered that class last and left it first. His father used a retirement savings of NT$280,000 for a one-way ticket and kept the pen that had earned it. He told his son that the pen was how the family had been raised. Dr. Chiu still keeps it.
Eight months
At MIT the usual doctorate took years. He had eight months, a father waiting for heart surgery, and no money for a return. The qualifying exam was the door. Twelve people sat it. Two passed. He had no calculator. One question asked for the periodic table. Another asked him to derive relativity. He passed, and the coursework requirement fell away. What stayed was the training of two departments. Nuclear engineering taught him to count human error, not only equipment. Mechanical engineering taught him its school motto, mind and hand: do the work, then improve it.
Think beyond yourself
A teacher told him, "Think beyond yourself." When something looks different, ask why. A person errs about once in a hundred tasks. A piece of equipment fails about once in a hundred thousand. The traps can be named: a weak point, a missing step, a failure mode. Name them, and the rate can be driven toward zero. An error, in this work, is a consequence you cannot accept. Doing the wrong thing is one. Leaving undone what had to be done is the other. A forgotten key, recovered before the car moves, is a nuisance. A decision that costs a company five years is an error.
The record
In 1987 he and four MIT professors founded Performance Improvement International. The mission was plain: improve how equipment and people perform. The calls took him to places the public already knows, including Three Mile Island, the Challenger, and Air France 447. In 2006 the crisis-response practice was set apart. The prevention work remained. The record grew from thousands of crises, accidents, and equipment failures into more than 80,000 cases. About forty percent had succeeded and about sixty percent had failed. The difference that remained was the number of errors.
The bonfire
Before dawn on 18 November 1999, the Aggie Bonfire at Texas A&M collapsed. Twelve people died. Twenty-seven were hurt. The pile of logs was unstable, and another collapse was easy to cause. Others wanted the logs lifted from the top. Dr. Chiu ordered the structure braced, and the logs removed from the bottom, one at a time. People at the scene said the order was wrong. Later tests showed that lifting from the top would have brought the pile down twice. He kept the lesson. When the moment is tense, look at the evidence. Do not follow the loudest voice.
In 2003 a valve explosion at a power plant burned his back. The years of arriving after the harm had a cost. The work turned. The same method would be used to keep the next failure from starting.
The work of this home
Zero, here, means zero crises, zero harm, zero accidents, and zero equipment failures that still have a consequence. Analyxer carries that method into ordinary practice. One analysis uses one of the four products: a technical review, a project, a decision, or a problem taken down to its cause. A few published experts hold the public page. The strength of this home is a member who stays for the year and uses the work on real problems.
This account is drawn from the November 2025 profile of Dr. Chong Chiu in MIT Sloan Management Review, Taiwan edition. It is not a reproduction of that article.