Flaws Help You Get Better

I was talking to the director of a substance abuse treatment center about fraud perpetrated by a former counselor. She kept trying to say that it was impossible to have a failure in their system.

A failure did occur, no matter how much probing I did she did not admit failing. She insisted that the fraud happened outside their system, even after I proved to her that something within their system had been compromised.

Failure occurred, where she admitted it or not. I understand that part of her steadfastness may have been an attempt to limit liability. Still, I found the stance confusing. In prisons we look for weaknesses. We want to find failure so we can prevent it. We test systems. We try to break them. We attack flaws. We make corrections to practices and attack again. We do not assume a system is flawless. All systems have flaws. We want to be the ones to find the flaws. We don’t want it to be an inmate who finds the flaw.

That would be a real liability.