Ah, here I leave you, my friend. Leaving aside actual malicious employees (who are rare but do exist) and good employees who've decided to steal everything not nailed down on their way out the door (more common), most people are trying to do a good job! https://twitter.com/garius/status/1289127366401445888

Most employees, in fact, are trying to do the best job they can, given their mental model of what "a good job" means, and their ability to effectuate that! The reason that simplicity matters in governance is not that employees make bad decisions

It's that employees literally cannot mentally model complex governance systems with any kind of fidelity. You (me) the person building them probably can't either. But I short-circuit decisions one way based on what my performance reviews judge me on, and the people I'm governing

short-circuit those decisions other ways, and under a punitive framework I gloss those decisions as "bad" and blame and punish the employees involved (when something breaks, but not until then).

Maybe it's less that blame is the enemy of safety and more that punishment is.

(And blame^H^H^H^Hsocial opprobrium is received as punishment, h/t the conversation I had with my therapist literally this afternoon and cc: @ReinH)