Blips Are Terrifying

And they deserve much more attention than we often pay them

a blip in a flat line on a dark monitor in a solid background, sleek, minimal digital art — by DALL·E

Blips are dangerous. It is almost impossible to deal with errors or mishaps that only happen once. The causes are hard to predict, and the consequences are a complete surprise. They might tell us about how we deal with the unexpected but they shouldn’t inform future actions, as the event is not likely to repeat itself. Blips are hard to put into a specific context. It might be an unrelated dysfunction or something that should not have happened, but it could also be a symptom of a system-wide failure.

That is the tricky part: we need more than one or two blips to find a pattern. Our brains are designed to spot patterns everywhere, a bias we must combat here, for blips are the anti-pattern par excellence. How do we tell an irrelevant event from a consequential one? What about two of the same kind? When does it stop being a coincidence? Wait too long, and we have a crisis. Act too soon, and we have created a crisis.

Moreover, it can become trickier: dismissing flaws as blips is too convenient. We might be too scared of impending structural damage and keen to explain a symptom as an irrelevant accident. This practice is far more common than we care to accept. A glitch is often welcome because it tells us we aren’t responsible for the disruption, and that there is…