Connect detection, challenge, diagnosis, authority, remedy and learning.
About 45 minutes, including the exercise.
Learning objectives
Connect detection, challenge, diagnosis, authority, remedy and learning.
Test a handoff rather than counting safeguards.
Companion reading in Better Answers, Worse Decisions: Chapter 13. The book is for separate purchase. This course does not provide the manuscript or chapter downloads.
The lesson
Follow one error all the way through
List the stages an important error must pass: detection, independent challenge, diagnostic competence, stop or reversal authority, remedy and institutional learning. This is a design framework, not a claim that every institution has the same sequence or that a checklist guarantees success. Some steps occur together; some require an external body. The point is to make the links visible.
A collection of controls can contain a broken path. A monitor may detect drift without notifying the team that owns the decision. An investigator may establish the cause but lack power to suspend the system. An individual remedy may leave the common cause untouched. Test whether evidence can move between stages and change the next action.
Define the handoff
For each link, record an input, recipient, time limit, decision and retained evidence. “Escalated to management” is too vague to test. Which management role? What information is necessary? What happens if that person is absent? When does a delayed response itself trigger a different action? A usable plan should survive an inconvenient case, not just a cooperative one.
Include both prospective and retrospective work. Suspending a faulty process prevents new exposure; it does not identify everyone already affected. A corrected database does not ensure that dependent decisions are reconsidered. Remedy may require communication, re-evaluation, operational recovery or compensation. The appropriate form depends on the actual duty and harm, not on the convenience of the technical fix.
Learn without rewriting the record
Preserve what was known at the time, the original decision and the reason for its revision. Otherwise the institution may appear to have been correct all along, losing the evidence needed to understand failure. Keep versions and distinguish a corrected output from the historical output that influenced action.
After repair, test whether the underlying cause has changed and whether the correction created another problem. Retest the affected dependency, not just the final screen. Record the limits of the evidence. A successful correction is grounds for a bounded conclusion about that repair, not a certificate that the whole system is safe.
Invented for this course
A wrong eligibility field
In an invented service, an imported field wrongly excludes some applicants. Monitoring finds the discrepancy, but staff initially repair only the displayed values.
Preserve the original import and identify which decisions depended on it.
Stop or constrain new decisions using the faulty field, investigate the transformation and correct its source.
Reconsider affected decisions, provide the appropriate remedy and verify that downstream systems received the correction.
Retest the import with edge cases and retain evidence of the revised rule and its limits.
What follows: The correction is incomplete if the data look right but past decisions and downstream copies remain wrong.
Attempt before opening feedback
Run a tabletop correction
Choose one invented error. Write a six-stage correction path and introduce an interruption: the owner is absent, a source is unavailable or the first challenge is rejected. Explain how the path continues.
Review criteria
Every handoff names evidence, authority and a time condition.
The plan covers both new exposure and previously affected decisions.
The retained record distinguishes the original state from the correction.
Worked feedback
A convincing plan has an alternate authorised recipient and a proportionate interim state. It does not silently delete inconvenient records or assume that fixing a source automatically repairs every dependent decision. It also states what cannot yet be verified.
Formative practice
Check your reasoning
This is an open self-check, not a secure examination or certificate. Answers and explanations are available below. Nothing you enter is sent to a server.
Keep your working notes
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