Week 11 — Every Failure Gets a Story Afterwards

Post-mortems as documents with authors, and the system boundaries they assume.

Week 11 · attribution · 5 October 2026

A post-mortem reports the system boundary of whoever wrote it, so the cause of a failure is partly an institutional choice.

Property

attribution

Stance

Challenges it

How

One fictional failure, five reports.

Studio activity

Locate each report's implied system boundary. Then write the sixth.

The same blackout can be a generation failure, a transmission failure, a market design failure, a governance failure or a weather event, depending on where the author drew the edge of the system.

How this challenges the thesis#

The thesis treats the failure boundary as something an engineer states. Week 11 argues the boundary is also chosen, and often chosen by whoever is writing afterwards. That does not make it arbitrary — but it means attribution is partly a question about institutions, and a design that names its own boundary is making an institutional claim as well as a technical one.

In the session#

One fictional failure, five reports of it, each written from a different vantage point. You locate the system boundary each report assumes, then write the sixth report yourself and declare your own boundary rather than letting it be inferred.

What next week needs#

You have now seen how a failure gets narrated. Week 12 asks you to commit to a system before the narration starts.