Recent systemic failures in different domains continue to remind us of the fragility of complex sociotechnical systems. Although these failures occurred in different domains, there are common failure mechanisms that often underlie such events. Hence, it is important to study these disasters from a unifying systems engineering perspective so that one can understand the commonalities as well as the differences to prevent or mitigate future events. A new conceptual framework that systematically identifies the failure mechanisms in a sociotechnical system, across different domains is proposed. Our analysis includes multiple levels of a system, both social and technical, and identifies the potential failure modes of equipment, humans, policies, and institutions. With the aid of three major recent disasters, how this framework could help us compare (C) 2016 American Institute of Chemical Engineers