Zero-Tolerance for Failure

When to Use

Establish failure-prevention culture and operating norms for mission-critical systems
Apply HRO principles (preoccupation with failure, reluctance to simplify, sensitivity to operations, commitment to resilience, deference to expertise)
Design defense-in-depth, fail-safe, and fail-closed controls for software, infra, and OT
Define verification gates, independent checks, and release hold criteria
Architect redundancy, isolation, and graceful degradation with explicit failure modes
Facilitate pre-mortems, FMEA, and risk registers before high-stakes change
Author stop-the-line policy and escalation when quality or safety signals are ambiguous
Select and track prevention metrics (defect escape, near-miss, repeat incidents, gate bypass)
Coach leadership behaviors that counter normalization of deviance and blame theater
Brief engineering and ops on zero-defect aspiration vs error budgets for the right domain