On systems, pressure, and the architecture of good decisions.

Perrow's Normal Accident Theory holds that in complex, tightly coupled systems, serious failures aren't aberrations — they're the predictable consequence of the architecture itself. The same logic applies to transactions. What looks like a coordination problem is often a design problem.

"At a certain level of complexity, coherence doesn't emerge from effort. It has to be designed in — ideally before the pressure arrives, because designing it under pressure is genuinely difficult."