“[There is] a plethora of books, blogs, TED talks, and commentary [on leadership]. Unfortunately, these materials are often wonderfully disconnected from organizational reality and, as a consequence, useless for sparking improvement.”

[Jeffrey Pfeffer, Organizational Behavior Professor at the Stanford University Graduate School of Business, Getting beyond the BS of leadership literature, McKinsey Quarterly, January 2016]

“Catastrophic events often result not from a single cause but from interconnected risk factors and cascading failures. Each risk factor taken in isolation might not cause a disaster, but risk factors working in synergy can. Complex, interconnected systems generate many, sometimes unexpected or counterintuitive vulnerabilities. Where a small, localized, single event can trigger cascading failures, then a small, localized, single intervention can also provide a mitigation. In these situations, to adequately perform risk management requires a deep understanding of how the behavior of a complex system or system of systems emerges from its many constituent parts.”
[ISO 16085 Risk management in SW engineering, chapter 5.1.5 Complexity and its relationship to risk]

"[Communication is] an inferential game in which individuals do their best to make sense of sketchy patterns of sights, sounds, and markings on paper, [a process that is] difficult and chancy."
[Berger, C.R. (1992) Goals, plans, and mutual understanding in relationships, in S. Duck (Ed.), Understanding relationship processes, Vol. 1: Individuals and relationships, Newbury Park, CA: Sage]

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