Hard Problems
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Organizations resist decisions that make tradeoffs explicit.

Geoffrey VickersThe Art of Judgment, 1965

In a scaling issue where efficiency and resilience pull apart, speed is rewarded and caution is punished, even when the picture is incomplete. Under that pressure, decisiveness gets confused with certainty.

When the decision stays implicit, the system still commits—by drift, escalation, or whoever speaks last. You see it in a local fix that creates a new problem at the seams, where the first clear call happens after the cost has already been paid. Be honest about what would change your mind, because without a revisit signal every decision becomes permanent by default.

Name the cost you are accepting so you can defend it later. That is how you keep pressure from rewriting the decision. Let others hold you to it.

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