Chernobyl disaster was caused by "I wonder what happens if we turn off all the safety and try this"

Sometimes running a business without clear policies, processes and procedures can lead to disaster. I'm not against innovation or agile but next time somebody says "what's the worst that can happen" do give this some thought!

The cause of the accident was human error.  The RBMK reactor is designed to run at or near full power or be shut down.  Running it at low power is a bad idea, since that design is unstable at low power settings.  There was also a design flaw in the control rods that, under the right conditions, could cause a momentary increase in reactor power.  Anyway, the reactor operators (without input from the folks who designed the reactor) were running a test to see if, after a shutdown, the residual heat in the core could make enough steam to keep a backup turbine spinning to power the backup cooling system.  Great idea- if they'd known exactly what they were doing.  When the reactor (being held at low power for the test) went unstable, the operators tried to SCRAM it (emergency shutdown.)  Tragically, when they dropped the control rods, the reactor was in the exact state that would make the control rods cause a power spike.  That caused a "power excursion" in the core.  Now, a hair dryer puts out about 1,000 Watts of heat.  At full power, the Chernobyl reactor would power 1 million hairdryers, and put out as much heat as 3.5 million hairdryers running at once.  Now, imagine releasing enough heat to run those 3.5 million hairdryers for months- in half a second.  All the water in the core flashed to steam, and blew the reactor to smithereens