The logic of pre-emption is superficially compelling. If you know what someone will do — or believe you know, with sufficient confidence — acting before the harm occurs seems obviously preferable to acting after it….
Browsing Category Governance
Structures for accountability, assurance and better decisions in complex organisations.
Judged by Prediction
The question this pillar addresses is specific: what happens when a system decides who you are — or what you will do — before the evidence of your life has come in? This is not…
Judged by Your Data Double
In Gattaca’s future, you are read before you act. A drop of blood at the door, a hair caught in the office chair, a smear on the lift button — each one files a report…
False Consensus: The Meeting Where Everyone Agrees
False consensus is what happens when an institution has made dissent too costly to voice. Not banned, not punished explicitly — simply expensive enough in social and professional terms that people prefer to agree publicly…
The Comprehension Gap — and the One Structural Cure
There is a particular kind of disaster that, in hindsight, nobody can quite believe was allowed to happen. The warning signs were visible. Someone, somewhere in the building, had run the numbers and gone pale….
How Institutions Fall
The satisfying story of institutional failure has a villain — someone who knew, who chose, who can be named and removed. The accurate story rarely does. Institutions mostly fail the way the firm in Margin…
Decentralised Command: The Canonical Pair
Extreme Ownership and Turn the Ship Around! are the two most cited books on distributed authority in organisational settings, and they are superficially contradictory. One argues that a leader must own everything — total responsibility,…
“I Intend To”: Three Words That Move Authority
The mechanism sounds minor: change “request permission to do X” to “I intend to do X.” The person receiving the communication can still stop it — nothing prevents a senior officer from saying no. The…
Be First, or Be Left Holding It
The senior executive in Margin Call — a fictional film about a fictional firm — states the logic plainly: in a collapsing market, there are three ways to survive. Be first, be smarter, or cheat. He is…
Where Power Actually Sits
There is the authority an organisation chart describes, and there is the authority that actually operates. They overlap, but never completely, and the space between them is where a surprising amount of institutional life happens…