"A procedure is a hypothesis about how work should be done.
The quote doesn’t need embellishment. In a data pipeline change where failures can be silent, the word hypothesis is enough to tell you what will repeat. Your job is to make the repetition safe.
In a data pipeline change where failures can be silent, good engineers will do what the system rewards. You see it in a design decision that is legible today and costly tomorrow, and you can’t fix it with reminders. Make the signal observable, not philosophical, so you can act without debating intentions. Write it down because otherwise two reasonable engineers will execute two different interpretations, and the system will call it “miscommunication.”
Erik Hollnagel is a reminder to keep it concrete. Write the hidden assumption as a sentence, then choose the signal that would break it. Keep it short enough to remember under stress.