J. M. Guillot writes essays and fiction on institutional failure, ethical inertia, and the human cost of administrative systems. His work examines how responsibility diffuses inside organizations, how risk is normalized, and how dysfunction persists without malice. He lives in Canada.
Risk Accepted Without Reading
The meeting was not adversarial. That matters, because conflict implies opposition, and there was none. Everyone was polite. Everyone agreed that risk should be managed. Everyone agreed that quality mattered. The only disagreement concerned timing and effort, not substance. I arrived with notes. Not rhetorical ones. Technical ones. Design assumptions that did not hold. Failure modes that compounded rather than isolated. Dependencies that behaved acceptably in isolation but catastrophically in sequence. None of this was speculative. The evidence existed. It had been gathered slowly, over weeks, by watching the system behave under ordinary conditions. ...