Discovered: Apr 30, 2026 14:30 (UTC) Courtney Nash:: ‘The person who seemingly “caused” the incident is almost certainly the same person who prevented a dozen others that nobody ever wrote about, because all practitioner actions are gambles taken under uncertainty, and we only call them errors when the outcome is bad.`’ from ‘“Human Error” Is an Illusion: A Response to Om Malik ¦ Resilience in Software Foundation

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This matters because complex systems don’t operate in a safe, neutral state waiting to be disrupted by careless people (or mischievous machines). They are, as Cook puts it, always running in degraded mode: containing ever-changing mixtures of latent failures at any given moment, held together not despite their human operators but because of them. Practitioners are the adaptable element of these complex systems, constantly making real-time adjustments that regularly prevent those latent failures from compounding into catastrophe. The person who seemingly “caused” the incident is almost certainly the same person who prevented a dozen others that nobody ever wrote about, because all practitioner actions are gambles taken under uncertainty, and we only call them errors when the outcome is bad.

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