Error Management Theory

Error Management Theory tries to explain in a sentence what life explains in a decade. It is a fair compression.

What the theory says, finally, is that people are predictable in their unpredictability. That is useful knowledge. It lets you forgive more and be surprised less.

It is worth keeping in your pocket not because it is always right, but because it is always available. A tool you carry beats a perfect tool you left at home.

Picture the government office at four in the afternoon. The file moves only when someone owns it; until then it is everybody's business, which is to say, nobody's.

An organisation is only a group of people who have agreed, for now, to pull in roughly the same direction. Do not memorise it. Notice it. Noticing is the senior discipline.