"Organizations become efficient at producing the outcomes they experience most often.
Six months from now, the write-up will read like inevitability. In a rewrite proposal that assumes the ending is known, every step on the way will have sounded reasonable. That is how drift stays invisible.
In a rewrite proposal that assumes the ending is known, you will be tempted to trade a small, visible win for a large, delayed cost. Drift happens when the cost stays unnamed. You see it in removing redundancy from a deployment path to look “lean”. A clean stop line prevents optimism from keeping a failing bet alive long after the evidence turns.
Geoffrey Vickers is a reminder to audit the argument, not the intention. Draft the future critique now: how this fails and what justification you will be tempted to use, then name one guardrail. Be calm and explicit.