What Breaks Was Built That Way

Breaks are not always sudden.
Most are slow.
Silent.
Predictable in hindsight, if not in practice.

You don’t find failure in the moment it cracks.
You find it in the shape that made cracking likely.

Every dropped thread, every missed step, every grinding delay,
was built that way.

It’s not that someone slipped.
It’s that the path was slick.
It’s not that someone forgot.
It’s that the system didn’t remember for them.

We blame people because they’re visible.
We blame tools because they’re tangible.
But most problems are structure.

And structure is quiet.
Until it fails.

The system always teaches what’s acceptable.
Even when you don’t mean to.
If it’s hard to know who owns something,
that’s the system.
If work keeps stalling at the same point,
that’s the system.
If people keep asking the same question,
that’s the system, too.

People adapt.
But structure endures.
And over time, it teaches people how to survive,
not how to succeed.

So when something breaks,
look at how it was built.

Because nothing breaks in isolation.
It breaks the way it was designed to.