Collective fallacies A to Z

A group can take a course of action that every member privately opposes, because each mistakes the silence of the others for agreement.

Subordinates perceive a sustained pattern of hostile verbal and non-verbal conduct from their supervisor, excluding physical contact.

Two parties who gain from cooperating each take a local action that solves their own problem by obstructing the other, and the partnership decays without anyone intending it.

An automated decision passes through so many hands that no one of them can be held answerable for its outcome, and the system itself cannot be.

A structure that breaks the link between a decision and anyone who can be asked about it, so complaints arrive nowhere.

When one side knows more about quality or risk than the other, the better-than-average side withdraws and the market can unravel to nothing.

A safety argument is true of the system as it was when the argument was written, and quietly becomes false as the system, its staff and its demands change around it.

Media coverage transfers salience rather than opinion: the issues given most attention become the issues the public names as most important.

Lay judges often weight advice more heavily when it is labelled as coming from an algorithm than from a person, but the preference reverses by task and fades among experts.

People abandon a statistical forecast after seeing it err, even when it is still more accurate than the human judgement they return to.

Each side arms because the other has, so both spend heavily and neither ends up safer than it began.

People will state an answer they can see is wrong when everyone ahead of them has stated it.

A campaign funded and directed by an interested party is presented as spontaneous public opinion, so that a sponsor’s position appears to be a constituency’s.

An account of how checking spreads until organisations reshape their work to produce the traces an auditor can verify, and verification of the traces replaces knowledge of performance.

The steeper the perceived power difference in a team, the less likely the junior member is to say what they have seen.

Operators monitoring a highly reliable automated system check it less and less, and so miss the rare occasion when it is wrong.

The machine does something the operator did not expect, and the operator cannot work out what it is doing, or why, in the time available.

A risk gains public credibility through repetition rather than measurement, because each retelling makes it easier to recall and makes doubt more costly to voice.

Copying the practices of measured high performers makes organisations more alike without making them better, because the practices were never what produced the performance.

The outputs of a project are delivered while the benefits promised in its business case are never measured, never realised, or quietly redefined.

Copying the visible practices of a successful organisation imports the form without the conditions that made it work, and the conditions are usually what mattered.

Replacing a working system wholesale rather than piece by piece trades a known set of defects for an unknown one, and buys an interval in which nothing ships.

A committee will spend more time on the item it understands than on the item that matters.

Telling people how they compare with the average moves those already better than average in the wrong direction, unless the message also says which direction is approved.

Durable regulation usually needs two coalitions: one that argues for it on moral grounds in public, and one that profits from it quietly.

Adding a road to a network in which drivers choose their own routes can make every driver slower.

Visible small disorder, left unrepaired, is held to signal that nobody is watching, and so to invite larger disorder.

Adding people to a late software project makes it later.

An agency that is the sole supplier of its output to a sponsor who cannot see its costs can secure a budget well above what the service requires.

Safety time held inside individual task estimates is consumed rather than pooled, so a project can run out of protection long before it runs out of work.

Variation in end demand is amplified at each step back up a supply chain, so the stage furthest upstream sees swings many times larger than anything the customer did.

The number of people who would have to leave before the work could not be carried on, and a warning that the number is usually smaller than anyone thinks.

The more people who witness a situation that calls for help, the less likely any one of them is to act.

The more a quantitative indicator is used to make decisions, the more it will be corrupted and the more it will distort the process it was meant to monitor.

Copying the visible forms of a successful practice while missing the mechanism that made it work, and expecting the results to follow.

When the load carried by a failed element is redistributed to its neighbours, each with a finite margin, a single local failure can propagate until it takes down a system far larger than itself.

Organisations adopt the structures their environment rewards and then insulate the real work from them, so policy and practice run on separate tracks.

The five stages of grief, borrowed as a schedule for how staff will react to organisational change, despite failing as a description of grief itself.

Do not remove a rule or a structure until you can say what it was put there to do.

A contest in which a threat works only if the other side believes you will not back down, so the advantage goes to whoever can visibly destroy their own ability to back down.

A reward offered for reducing something creates a supply of the thing, so the scheme increases what it was meant to suppress.

A group of people who all want the same outcome will not act to produce it, because each does better letting the others pay for it.

Coordinated action often requires not merely that everyone knows a fact, but that everyone knows that everyone knows it, and no exchange of fallible messages can establish that.

Redundant components that share a cause fail together, so a reliability figure obtained by multiplying independent failure probabilities can be wrong by orders of magnitude.

Measures that produce the appearance of safety or compliance for an audience while doing little to the risk they are said to address.

A small group with a large stake each will organise; a large group with a small stake each will not, so policy tilts towards the few even when the many lose more in total.

A belief spreads through a closed network by cascade and then seals itself, because the evidence that would refute it is issued by the sources the belief has already disqualified.

Any organisation that designs a system will produce a design whose structure copies the communication structure of that organisation.

Each person added to a group adds more links than hands, so the cost of keeping everyone aligned grows faster than the group does.

Organisations divide work competently and then fail to put it back together, because division is visible and integration is not.

Where one person holds wide discretion, the organisation reorganises itself around access to that person, and proximity becomes the currency the formal structure no longer describes.

When performance is judged on outcomes, providers raise the average by selecting the cases most likely to succeed and quietly shedding the rest.

As a qualification becomes more common, the level demanded for a given job rises, so more education buys the same position.

The idea that a crowd dissolves individual judgement into a primitive collective mind comes from Le Bon and has no evidential support; systematic study finds crowd action patterned and bounded by shared identity.

Time and attention move to the tested subjects, so the curriculum shrinks to the shape of the accountability measure.

Companies selected as exemplars by a bestselling management book tend to fall back towards the average soon after publication, leaving the principles drawn from them unsupported.

Interfaces built so that the choice favouring the operator is easy and the choice favouring the user is effortful, hidden or embarrassing.

The claim that narcissism, Machiavellianism and psychopathy are concentrated at the top of organisations and account for much of the harm done there, which the measured literature supports far more weakly than the claim is made.

A person or body answering an accusation denies the conduct, attacks the credibility of whoever raised it, and reverses the roles so that the accused appears as the injured party and the accuser as the aggressor.

Anonymity does not release restraint so much as hand control of behaviour to whatever the local norm happens to be.

A correcting loop that acts on delayed information will overshoot, and if it corrects hard enough relative to the delay the overshoot grows into a standing cycle.

What most people actually do and what most people approve of are two different norms, and a message that confuses them can push behaviour the wrong way.

Work is reorganised so that the knowledge needed to do it moves out of the worker and into procedures, machines or management, leaving a narrower job behind.

The reaction to a behaviour increases the behaviour, because the response isolates the people labelled and makes the label the most available identity they have.

Dissent that is assigned rather than felt reassures a group without changing its mind.

Poor performers are moved into management because that is where they can do least damage to the work.

A request large enough to be refused makes a smaller follow-up more likely to be granted, because the retreat reads as a concession that ought to be reciprocated.

Where travellers can switch between driving and public transport, road speeds settle at the speed of the alternative, so widening the road can leave everyone slower.

A cognitive limit of about 150 is said to cap the number of stable relationships a person can hold, and so the size of any group that runs on relationships alone.

An association measured between groups need not hold, and can reverse, for the individuals inside them.

People and organisations continually trade thoroughness for efficiency, and because the trade almost always works, the adjustment that normally produces success is the same one that occasionally produces the failure.

The response to a perceived unfairness that neither complains nor leaves, but quietly reduces what is given.

When admitting the obvious would mark a person as incompetent or disloyal, a plainly false claim can be maintained in public by everyone at once.

The people a decision is about are absent when it is made, so the standing remedy is to seat them, or someone who is accountable to them and can lose the argument on their behalf.

When performance falls short, the gap can be closed by lowering the goal, and a goal that is allowed to move will move.

Where reporting is safe, reported error rates rise, so a falling error count is as likely to mean that people have stopped telling you as that the work has become safer.

Two parties each act to restore their position relative to the other, so every move provokes the counter-move that makes it necessary again.

Members of a group over-estimate how many colleagues share their reading of a decision, and score silence as agreement.

An incumbent defends its position not by making a case but by raising doubts that make any change look risky, so that the safe course is to do nothing.

A penalty attached to a behaviour can license it, by converting a moral obligation into a service with a stated price.

A propaganda pattern defined by high volume across many channels, rapid repetition, and no commitment either to accuracy or to consistency between its own claims.

A remedy that relieves the symptom quickly sets in motion a slower consequence that returns the symptom, larger.

A delusion held by two people in a closed relationship, sustained less by transmission from one mind to the other than by the absence of anyone outside able to contradict it.

Agreeing to a small request raises the chance of agreeing to a much larger one later, because the first compliance changes how the person describes themselves.

Grading a workforce against a fixed distribution and cutting the bottom band, a practice whose claimed benefits rest largely on simulation rather than measurement.

The habits and informal authority that let a founder build an organisation become the constraint on it once the organisation outgrows what one person can hold.

When a benefit cannot be withheld from those who do not pay for it, the rational move is to let someone else pay.

Where goals are unclear and attention is scarce, decisions are made by the chance meeting of problems, solutions, participants and occasions rather than by anyone solving anything.

A sustained attempt to make a person distrust their own perception and memory, so that their account of events can be discounted — by others, and eventually by themselves.

Women and minority staff move normally through the lower and middle grades and then meet a barrier at senior level that their qualifications, tenure and performance do not explain.

Women and minority candidates are appointed more often to leadership posts that are already in trouble, so their tenure starts with a raised chance of visible failure.

A procedure adopted to achieve an end becomes the end, and is defended even where it no longer serves the purpose.

Low expectations held by a teacher or a supervisor are said to depress the performance of the people they are held about, the mirror image of the Pygmalion claim.

A measure that was informative while nobody was trying to move it stops being informative once people are required to move it.

After discussing an issue with like-minded others, people hold more extreme versions of the views they arrived with.

A cohesive group under pressure is said to suppress dissent and converge early on a course of action worse than any member would have chosen alone.

Growth loads capacity, service quality falls, demand falls with it, and the fall in demand is read as evidence that the capacity was never needed.

An overall impression of a person colours every separate judgement made about them, so ratings of distinct qualities move together and carry far less information than their number suggests.

Knowing that a company performed well leads observers to rate its culture, leadership and strategy highly, so studies asking what made great companies great are measuring the result rather than the cause.

Behaviour is said to change because it is being observed — a claim named after a study whose own data do not support it.

When the information needed for the best decision is divided among members, groups discuss what they already share and miss the answer.

A few organisations operate hazardous technologies with far fewer accidents than their risk profile predicts, and the explanation offered is a set of organising practices rather than better technology.

Once reviewers know how an episode ended, they cannot recover how uncertain it looked beforehand, and the outcome makes the warning signs seem obvious and the decision negligent.

Where evidence is thin or unwelcome, the question is settled by the most senior person in the room.

Ties form between similar people far more often than chance allows, so a pipeline built on referral reproduces its own composition, and a criterion called fit turns that pattern into a rule.

Calling an outcome human error names the last person in the chain and ends the inquiry, turning the thing that needs explaining into the explanation.

New road capacity is filled by traffic that did not exist before it was built, so congestion returns to close to where it started.

When people act in sequence and can see each other’s choices but not their reasons, it becomes rational to ignore your own information, and the group converges on a position resting on the first few signals.

Where one person or unit is the only route to something the organisation needs, withholding it is a rational way to hold position.

Initiatives are added faster than they are retired, so each receives too small a share of attention to change anything.

Activity that displays innovation — labs, hackathons, accelerators, sprints — while the budgets, procurement rules and decision rights that would let anything new be adopted stay exactly as they were.

Organisations in the same field come to resemble one another, not because the shared form works better, but because resemblance secures legitimacy and resources.

Since structure shapes architecture, move the team boundaries first and let the system you want follow.

Large projects come in over budget, over time and under benefit, at a rate that has not improved across the decades for which records exist.

Any organisation large enough to need full-time officials tends to be run by them, though the evidence makes this a tendency rather than the iron law Michels claimed.

A legislative committee, an agency and an organised interest can close a policy area to outsiders, because each holds something the other two need.

Automating the easy parts of a job leaves the operator the hard parts, less practice at them, and the duty of taking over exactly when things are worst.

Performance falls before it rises after a change, because the supports for the old practice go before the new practice is competent.

Making the use of a resource more efficient can increase the total amount of it consumed, because efficiency makes the service it provides cheaper.

A reporting system works only when staff know in advance where the line falls between an honest mistake, which will be treated as information, and a reckless act, which will not.

Because layering a new rule on the old ones is politically cheaper than replacing them, policy accumulates complexity, and the cost of that complexity is paid in citizens’ time.

An official label applied to a person changes how others treat them and how they come to see themselves, and can produce more of the behaviour it names.

Publishing ranked institutional results changes behaviour inside the institutions, improving the published measure and pulling effort towards whoever sits nearest the line.

A state must simplify what it administers into categories it can read, and when the simplification is then imposed as a design, it destroys what made the thing work.

Raters differ systematically in where they place people on a scale, some high, some low, some all in the middle, so a rating carries information about the rater as well as about the person rated.

A reinforcing engine of growth eventually meets a constraint, and pushing the engine harder does nothing but raise the cost of hitting it.

People do what makes sense given their goals, their knowledge and their focus of attention at the moment, so an action that looks irrational afterwards was reasonable from inside.

A relationship estimated under one policy regime cannot be used to predict what a change of regime will do, because the behaviour that produced it will change too.

Effort spent shaping how a manager sees the work is rewarded about as well as the work itself, so substituting the first for the second is a rational response to how appraisal is built.

Availability is restricted, or made to appear restricted, so that the thing is valued more highly and decided on more quickly.

A propaganda model in which five structural filters, rather than censorship, make a commercial press system produce coverage broadly aligned with the interests of those who fund and source it.

Physical symptoms spread through a group by observation and expectation rather than by any organic agent, most often in closed settings such as schools and factories.

Advantage compounds: an early lead in resources, credit or recognition attracts more of the same, so small initial differences widen into large ones.

Measure what is easy, disregard what is not, then treat what cannot be measured as unimportant and finally as non-existent.

The cost of a meeting is the time of everyone in it, and no budget records that, so meetings are treated as free.

The practical knowledge built up by doing a particular job in a particular place cannot be written down as a procedure, and is lost when the procedure replaces it.

The belief that measurement can replace judgement, that published numbers secure accountability, and that people are best motivated by rewards tied to those numbers.

Ordinary people continued to deliver what they believed were dangerous shocks because a man in a laboratory coat asked them to.

The claim that believers respond to a publicly failed prophecy by proselytising harder rests on one contaminated case study, and later surveys of failed prophecies find it is not the usual response.

People believe others are moved by money and security while believing themselves moved by interest and mastery.

One person is singled out for sustained hostile acts by a group of colleagues, so that the harm comes from the pattern and its duration rather than from any single act.

A population of near-identical units is efficient and uniformly vulnerable: one pathogen, exploit or design flaw matched to the shared type takes all of it at once.

When a largely automated system fails, responsibility concentrates on the nearest human operator, who had neither the control nor the information to prevent it.

Once someone else carries the cost of an outcome, the party who controls it takes less care, and no bad faith is required.

A group or condition is defined as a threat to shared values and the reaction runs ahead of any measured harm, leaving behind institutional changes that outlast the episode.

Paying people for something they were doing out of duty, reciprocity or identity can reduce how much of it they do.

An ambitious claim that could not survive challenge is advanced under cover of a modest one that can, with the arguer retreating to the modest claim when pressed and returning to the ambitious one when not.

Relieving the constraint in a flow system does not remove the constraint; it moves to the next resource, and effort spent anywhere else adds cost without adding throughput.

People withhold bad news from those it concerns, even when they had nothing to do with it and no reason to fear blame.

The man-month is a unit that assumes people and time can be traded for one another, which holds only for work that requires no communication.

An event that could have caused harm but did not is filed as evidence that the system works, rather than as evidence that it nearly failed.

The first 90 per cent of a project takes 90 per cent of the time, and the remaining 10 per cent takes the other 90 per cent.

Work that has to be done but earns nobody a promotion, distributed not by skill but by who is expected to say yes.

In systems that are both interactively complex and tightly coupled, serious accidents are a property of the design rather than a failure of the operators, and cannot be engineered away by adding more safety devices.

A group repeatedly accepts a departure from its own standard without harm, and the departure becomes the standard against which the next one is judged.

A group discounts knowledge, tools or solutions because they came from outside it, and pays to rebuild what it could have adopted.

Add a mandated percentage to a project’s own cost estimate at approval, set from the outturn of past projects of the same type, and reduce it only as specific risks are actually retired.

Organisational silence is the collective withholding of concerns and dissent, produced by shared beliefs about what it is safe to say rather than by individual timidity.

Commons institutions that last for generations share eight design features, most of which work by making monitoring cheap and defection visible.

An operator who has not been doing the task loses the picture of its current state, and so recovers slowly and badly when handed control.

Rewarding an activity someone already chose to do can reduce the chance they choose it again once the reward stops.

At any moment only a band of policy options can be advocated by someone who wants to stay in office, and what changes a policy is usually the movement of that band rather than an argument about the option.

Work expands to fill the time available for it, and administrative staff grows at a rate largely unrelated to the work there is to do.

Paying for measured output reliably raises the measured output, and reliably degrades everything the measure leaves out.

A theory of human behaviour can make itself true, because people use it to act, and the world then moves towards the model rather than the model towards the world.

Promotion on performance in the current job moves people up until they reach one they cannot do, and there they stay.

A manager uses the authority of a small post to control and belittle subordinates in ways that serve the manager rather than the work.

A pilot succeeds on conditions a rollout cannot reproduce, so the better it is run the less its result tells you.

Effects measured in small trials run by the people who designed a programme shrink, often to nothing, when it is evaluated independently at scale.

A group sustains a norm that most of its members privately reject, because each believes the others accept it.

A system pushed towards one actor’s goal pushes back, because everyone else acting on it works harder to restore the position they wanted.

Evidence is commissioned, selected and timed to support a decision already taken, so the appearance of an evidence base survives while its function does not.

In any bureaucracy, those devoted to the organisation itself come to control it, and those devoted to its stated purpose lose influence.

Groups quietly adapt written procedure to the conditions they usually face, and the adaptations only collide on the day the groups are coupled tightly together.

People state a public position they do not hold in order to avoid social cost, so public opinion can diverge sharply and invisibly from private opinion.

Attending work while ill, produced by the structure of cover and absence rules rather than by dedication.

When one party acts for another, cannot be fully observed and does not share its objectives, no contract removes the resulting loss; it can only be traded against risk.

A two-player game in which defection pays better than cooperation whatever the other side does, leaving both worse off than if both had cooperated.

Psychological safety is a belief shared within a team that speaking up with a question, a doubt or an admitted error will not be held against you.

Where status comes from demonstrating commitment and nobody gains by arguing for less, the standard ratchets upward until ordinary members are disqualified by a standard they helped to set.

Technical organisations divide into those who understand what they do not manage and those who manage what they do not understand.

Teachers told that particular pupils were about to bloom were reported to raise those pupils’ measured ability, an effect the later evidence has cut down sharply.

Women who have reached senior posts in a male-dominated organisation distance themselves from junior women and judge them more harshly than their male colleagues do.

When current output sets the next target, people hold back: good work today is paid for with a harder standard tomorrow.

Reviews are widely believed to weight the final weeks of the period far above the rest; the appraisal evidence finds that the standing impression does most of the work and that the direction of the timing effect is not fixed.

Therapeutic techniques adopted from the late 1980s to recover repressed memories of abuse are the same procedures that in the laboratory reliably generate confident memories of events that did not occur.

Everyone improves, so nobody gains: effort rises across a whole field while relative position stays exactly where it was.

Forecast a project from the outturn distribution of similar completed projects rather than from an estimate assembled out of its own details.

Exceptional company performance is part signal and part luck, so extreme results move back towards the average whatever anyone does, and the practices credited for the peak are blamed for the fall.

An agency created to regulate an industry comes to act in that industry’s interest, not usually through corruption but because the industry is the only constituency that turns up.

Where a prize can be won by effort rather than earned by production, the effort spent competing for it is pure loss, and it can consume the whole prize.

Requirements that keep changing after design has begun impose rework whose cost rises with everything already built on the version being replaced.

Officials move between government and the industries they oversee, and while the connections they carry have a measurable price, the softened enforcement usually attributed to the door has been hard to find.

Organisations routinely pay for one behaviour while hoping for another, and then are surprised to get the one they paid for.

Groups were long held to take riskier decisions than their members would take alone, a claim the later evidence did not sustain.

An accident in a complex system has no single root cause, only a set of conditions that had to coincide, so a search for one will always find something and always stop too early.

Rules are added faster than they are removed, so procedure accumulates until the burden bears little relation to the risks that produced it.

A rumour is not a message decaying as it passes down a chain but a group building an explanation for something it needs explained, and its accuracy depends on whether the network contains anyone who can check it.

Safety can be defined as the absence of accidents, which directs attention to the rare cases that go wrong, or as the capacity to succeed under varying conditions, which directs attention to the ordinary work that goes right.

A circulating legend of organised ritual abuse acquired investigative and therapeutic machinery that produced the accounts it was looking for, and no verified instance was ever found.

Deliverables grow by increments small enough that none triggers a re-plan, until the total is unrecognisable and the date has not moved.

The second system a designer builds is the most dangerous, because it collects every embellishment the first one had no room for.

A definition of a situation that is false to begin with calls out behaviour that makes it true, and the outcome is then read as proof that the definition was right all along.

An institution rejects a finding, and often the person who brought it, because accepting it would indict the practice the institution already follows.

A symptomatic remedy relieves the problem well enough that the fundamental capability is never built, and then cannot be.

Organisations come to protect the problem that justifies their existence.

The bearer of bad news is judged worse for having borne it, and everyone watching learns not to be next.

Units created to specialise acquire their own goals, measures and vocabulary, and then withhold from each other the information that only the whole organisation can use.

Raters judge people they perceive as similar to themselves more favourably, and the similarity that does the work is one of attitude and outlook rather than of demography.

An association present in every subgroup can reverse when the subgroups are pooled.

The presence of other people speeds up performance on a task you have mastered and degrades it on one you have not.

Individual effort falls as a group grows, whenever no one can see who contributed what.

People take what others around them are doing as evidence of what is correct, so a practice can spread through an organisation on the strength of its adoption count alone.

The habit of recasting a complex, contested situation as a neat problem that happens to fit the tools already to hand.

Purposive action produces outcomes nobody intended, and those outcomes come from a small number of sources that can be listed in advance.

The number of people reporting to one manager fixes how many layers an organisation needs, and the classical answer of five or six was a doctrine rather than a measurement.

A credit-fed price rise in which the reason to buy is that others are buying, running through a standard sequence to a point at which everyone tries to sell at once.

People who believe their view is losing ground in public become less willing to express it, which makes the view appear weaker still.

Women and minority staff receive advice and encouragement as often as their peers but are less often advocated for by someone with the standing to allocate a post.

A game with two stable outcomes — everyone cooperates, or everyone plays safe — in which the safe outcome can win despite being worse for all.

People at risk of confirming a negative stereotype about their group are held to perform worse on tests when that stereotype is made salient.

Forecasts attached to a proposal are shaped by what will win approval, so the numbers that reach the decision are optimistic by design rather than by accident.

Work that is given a padded deadline is started at the last moment the deadline allows, so the padding is spent before the work begins.

Optimising each part of a system on its own measure degrades the whole, because the parts are coupled and their local optima conflict.

Two parties draw on one pool of resource, and an early advantage to either is converted into the resources that produce the next advantage.

People withdraw effort not from laziness but to avoid being the one who carries someone who is not pulling.

People replace the thing they care about with the measure of it, and then stop being able to tell the difference.

Guidance drawn only from organisations that succeeded cannot say which of their practices mattered, because the ones that did the same things and failed were never in the sample.

An accident requires a momentary alignment of holes in several successive layers of defence, so the useful question is why the defences were weak rather than who made the final error.

Agreement supplied upward because it is rewarded, which leaves a leader with a record of confirmation and no record of dissent.

Instruction moves toward the specific form of the examination, so scores rise faster than the learning they are supposed to represent.

A shortcut taken to ship sooner leaves a structure that costs more to change, and the extra cost is paid on every later change until it is repaid.

The habit of asking what a technology does to people, as though the technology acted alone and the arrangements around it were incidental.

If people define situations as real, they are real in their consequences, whatever the situation actually is.

Organisations adopt the visible form of a requirement while the practice it was meant to change stays exactly where it was.

Where a group contains only a few members of a visibly different category, those few are treated as representatives of the category rather than as individuals.

Someone absorbs and neutralises the anger, anxiety and disappointment that decisions elsewhere in the organisation generate, at a cost that appears in no account and no job description.

When too many parties each hold a right to exclude, a resource is used far too little, which is the mirror image of the commons.

The claim that a shared resource is inevitably destroyed by its users unless it is privatised or policed, which holds for open access and not for commons.

The training that makes people competent in the normal case is what stops them seeing the abnormal one.

Hostile treatment a manager receives from their own superior is passed down the hierarchy, so conduct at the top of an organisation reappears at the bottom.

The Dutch bulb trade of 1636–37 is the standard illustration of mass financial madness, and most of the detail usually given for it was invented two centuries afterwards.

An organisation promotes from within on a fixed clock and requires anyone not promoted by the deadline to leave.

Each layer of a hierarchy passes on the version of events it can defend, so the account that reaches the top is not the account that was sent.

A story told as true, set locally and sourced to a friend of a friend, which persists because the versions that provoke disgust or fear are passed on more often than the versions that are accurate.

As a resource is loaded towards full capacity, waiting time rises without limit, so the last few percentage points of utilisation cost far more than they return.

When enough actors hold a right to block and none holds a right to decide, the status quo wins by default and reform is bought rather than chosen.

A programme is reported green at every level while the work underneath it is red, because each reviewer rates the report rather than the thing.

A charge is met not with a defence but with a counter-charge about the accuser or their side, so the question of what happened is replaced by a comparison of records.

The person who reports serious wrongdoing carries the cost alone while the benefit is spread across everyone else, which is why most people who see it say nothing.

In a contest for something of uncertain but common value, the winner is usually the bidder who overestimated it by the most.

An accusation system in which denial counts as evidence of guilt and confession buys leniency in exchange for naming others will grow until an authority changes the rules of evidence.

The work as described in procedures and the work as actually done diverge, because a procedure cannot contain all the variability the work contains.