Move guide
Failure modes
Notice how an arrangement can go wrong.
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- Substrate mismatchThe tool or person you picked is good at the shape of the job but bad at the part that actually matters.
- Local optimizationOne part of your setup gets faster while the whole thing gets slower, costlier, or riskier.
- Coordination taxSometimes the messaging, scheduling, and checking around a task quietly costs more than just doing the task.
- Context collapseWhen work moves to a new person or tool, the unwritten details that made it work get left behind, and private details that should have stayed put get carried along.
- Accountability diffusionWhen many people and tools touch a job but no one person is on the hook for the final result, the job quietly stops having an owner.
- Correlated independenceSeveral opinions can agree because they share a source, a method, or a paycheck, so they feel like proof when they are really one opinion repeated.
- Automation biasAutomation bias is when you trust a tool's answer more than the evidence behind it, usually because it has been right often enough that you stopped checking.
- Exception blindnessA setup that handles the ordinary case perfectly can fail silently on the rare case, and because nothing ever alarms, you keep trusting it.
- DeskillingDeskilling is when a tool makes your results better while your own ability to do the thing without it quietly gets worse.
- Agency erosionA system can quietly take away someone's real say in their own life even though nothing broke and nobody objected.
- Privacy or security spillYou gave a person, app, or AI more data, access, storage time, or audience than the job actually needed, so harm can happen even when everything works correctly.
- BrittlenessBrittleness is when your whole setup rests on one login, one supplier, one person, or one rule, so the hour that single thing fails, everything stops.
- Automation debtThe rules, shortcuts, and automations you set up keep running long after the world they were built for has changed, so they quietly go wrong while still looking like they work.
- Alert fatigueWhen warnings arrive so often that people stop reading them, the one warning that mattered gets ignored along with the rest.
- DehumanizationWhen you speed something up by routing it through a tool, the human part of it — presence, care, apology, trust — can quietly disappear while the task still looks done.
- Coercive defaultsYou get people to go along with you by making the alternative hard to reach instead of by convincing them, so their agreement is not really agreement.
- Surveillance creepMonitoring you set up for one small safety reason keeps growing until you are watching far more than the problem ever required.
- Incentive mismatchThe person, company, or tool you depend on is rewarded for hitting its own number, which is not the same thing as getting you the result you actually came for.
- Loss of separationWhen the same person or tool does the work, checks the work, and decides whether to go ahead, one mistake sails through every stage because nobody uncoupled from it is left to object.