Field Notes #071 | Protocol Drift

The policy was rigorous. The reasoning was forgotten.

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Walk into almost any engineering floor, software team, or enterprise department, and you will find people diligently performing steps that solve a problem from five years ago.

In this episode of Field Notes, Prasad Bhonde investigates Protocol Drift: what happens when an organisation records the instruction for a rule, but forgets to record the condition that made the rule necessary.

We explore why human systems are engineered to add procedures during moments of crisis, why asymmetric career incentives make obsolete rules nearly…