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A good model enables you to be wrong faster.

Without a theory, experience has no meaning.

Systems drift when long-term consequences remain abstract.

Organizations adapt faster to pressure than to insight.

Control reduces variance at the expense of adaptability.

Every standard carries an implicit theory of failure.

Control reduces variation but also reduces information.

Judgment improves when leaders decide what must remain uncertain.

What looks like a violation is often the only way the work gets done.

A system is never the sum of its parts; it is the product of their interactions.

Expert judgment requires accepting that some uncertainty is irreducible.

Every increase in efficiency increases vulnerability.

Safety is not a component, but an emergent property of the system.

Every act of measurement disturbs the system being measured.

Organizations often learn the wrong lessons from failure.

A complex system that works is invariably found to have evolved from a simple system that worked.

Organizations optimize what can be audited, not what matters.

The greatest source of error is the belief that one is not biased.

Failures are rarely caused by isolated errors but by the unexpected interaction of multiple factors.

High reliability is not the absence of errors, but the presence of capabilities that detect and contain them.

Design is the art of arranging constraints.

A decision is a commitment to action under uncertainty.

The most dangerous failures are those that appear rational at the time.