Psychology Today | 27.04.2026 23:16
When you build and operate in high-stakes, chaotic environments, you have to plan for failure. The Stoics had a name for thinking ahead about this: premeditatio malorum—the deliberate contemplation of what will go wrong. Modern systems science uses the term failure modes: the specific ways a system will break. The more clearly you can map your failure modes in advance, the more you can design your system to move through, over, or around them. Of course, not all failures are equal, and not all failure directions are the same. In this post, we will consider three axes for distinguishing between failures and how each one can inform different design choices for complex systems operating in high-stakes environments.
