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….
Posts tagged Risk
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…
The Comprehension Gap
There is a failure mode that appears in organisations of every kind and at every scale. It is not caused by bad people, or greed, or negligence, though those things may compound it. It is…