This chapter changes method. Rather than describing the system, it describes four institutions — composite, recognisable — and the specific decisions that made each of them fragile.
A recruitment curve that was projected upwards and never arrived. A building approved on the strength of that projection. A prestige investment carrying a subsidy nobody had costed. And a board paper written well enough to make optimism look governed.
None of these is a scandal. Each was signed off by competent people following a reasonable process, and each is the kind of decision that looks prudent right up until the assumption underneath it moves. That is the point: fragility here is not incompetence, it is a set of choices that the system rewarded at the time.
It also examines a near miss — an institution that treated optimism as a cost.
Management can make a brittle system more dangerous without having designed its brittleness.
Regulated to Fail, Chapter 12
Where this goes next
This is the question the chapter opens with and the mechanism it identifies. What it concludes — and what follows from it — is in the book.
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