Relying on hard data, committing to open and democratic communication, acknowledging fallibility: these are the central tenets of any system that aims to protect us from error. They are also markedly different from how we normally think—from our often hasty and asymmetric treatment of evidence, from the cloistering effects of insular communities, and from our instinctive recourse to defensiveness and denial. In fact, the whole reason these error-proofing techniques exist is to exert a counterweight on our steady state.
