IHI Power Systems’ fuel-data falsification: engineering that deceived engineering (2024)

A numbers company, and trust in its own numbers

The weight of this misconduct lies, it seems, less in the size of the sums than in the fact that it had been handed down as a shop-floor practice for some forty years. That it was passed on by word of mouth, never documented, points less to an individual’s deviation than to the problem of an organizational air that had permitted making the numbers look better. President Ide’s words — that “a company built on technology has ended up deceiving technology itself” — can be seen to strike at the paradox that the prouder a company is of its technology, the more it is bound by the correctness of the numbers that underwrite it.

IHI is pressing its concentration on aero-engines and trying to grow defence and decarbonization into its next pillars. Yet in every one of these fields, no differently from marine engines, measured figures underpin contracts, safety and regulation. Alongside the strategic debate over where to concentrate its businesses, the question of how to govern the figures those businesses produce is once more thrust upon this company, which has now passed through misconduct twice. On a plane apart from the skill of its concentration, how to rebuild the trust it has lost has become, it seems, a heavy premise for the next reconstruction.