Insights on high-stakes technical decisions

These notes are not best practices. They are drawn from situations where decisions had long-term, often irreversible consequences.

When “best practices” contradict your reality

Most large organizations don’t fail because they ignore best practices. They fail because they apply the wrong ones with too much confidence.

In regulated, high-stakes environments, best practices rarely arrive as neutral guidance. They arrive as competing injunctions.

The real problem is not technical. It is decisional: no constraint has been explicitly prioritized.

(Short version — full text available on request.)