"Organizations are shaped by the problems they face and the solutions they adopt.
The quote is short, but the word organizations carries the weight. In a scaling issue where efficiency and resilience pull apart, it tells you where reality will push back, even when the plan looks clean.
In a scaling issue where efficiency and resilience pull apart, good engineers will do what the system rewards. You see it in a local fix that creates a new problem at the seams, and you can’t fix it with reminders. Write it down because otherwise two reasonable engineers will execute two different interpretations, and the system will call it “miscommunication.”
Herbert A. Simon is a reminder to keep it concrete. Write the hidden assumption as a sentence, then choose the signal that would break it. Make the decision legible to the next person who inherits it.