Volume 3 · The Corner Cabin · Essay 304
Willful Blindness
There are ideas that shout. Willful Blindness is not one of them. It waits quietly until the day you need it.
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.
The idea is simple, and like most simple ideas it is easy to nod at and hard to use. The nod is free. The use costs attention, every day, in small change.
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. Write it on the wall of the mind, not the wall of the house. The house already has enough instructions.