Sublime

Exercise caution when using this approach; make sure that you can follow through with this implied commitment.

The second book he bought was Drift into Failure by Sidney Dekker, which he passed out to all his IT infrastructure and operations people. Dekker’s book forces organizational managers to rethink blame and accountability in complex processes. When something goes wrong, it asks, “Should you blame the person? Or is it the system?”2*

Typically, my organizational philosophy is to stabilize team-by-team and organization-by-organization. Ensuring any given area is well on the path to health before moving my focus. I try not to push risks onto teams that are functioning well. You do need to delegate some risks, but generally I think it’s best to only delegate solvable risk. If some

But let me say that, though I have often been taxed, by people who do not know me, with being a committee man — and in a sense I most certainly am — I have never believed that a group as such could manage anything. A group can make policy, but only individuals can administer policy.

Your next move, your intervention, should reflect your hypothesis about the problem, be considered an experiment (by yourself and maybe others), and be in the service of a shared purpose. Well-designed interventions provide context; they connect your interpretation to the purpose or task on the table so people can see that your perspective is relev

The principle of intervention, like that of healers, is first do no harm (primum non nocere); even more, we will argue, those who don’t take risks should never be involved in making decisions.