"If your project doesn't work, look for the part that you didn't think was important"
About this Quote
Failure rarely arrives with a drumroll; it slips in through the side door labeled "details". Arthur Bloch's line has the dry bite of someone who’s watched too many postmortems devolve into ego-preserving theater. The genius is its insult: it assumes your project didn’t fail because the goal was wrong or the team was lazy, but because you mis-ranked reality. You decided something was "not important" and reality disagreed.
Bloch, best known for Murphy’s Law riffs, is operating in the tradition of bureaucratic satire: the world is not merely messy, it’s perversely tuned to punish confidence. The quote weaponizes that pessimism as a practical method. It’s not "double-check your work" so much as "interrogate your assumptions", especially the comforting ones. The part you dismissed is where risk hides: the dependency you never documented, the edge case you waved away, the stakeholder you assumed would be fine, the tiny maintenance cost that metastasizes.
There’s also a psychological subtext: we don’t ignore the "unimportant" by accident. We ignore it because it’s boring, politically inconvenient, or threatens the clean story we’re telling ourselves about progress. Bloch’s sentence is a mandate to go hunting for the seductions of simplicity.
Context matters: this is management culture and engineering culture in one barb. Projects don’t die from one dramatic mistake; they die from a pile of "we’ll deal with that later". Bloch’s advice is ruthless because it’s accurate: the failure point is often the thing you were most proud to not worry about.
Bloch, best known for Murphy’s Law riffs, is operating in the tradition of bureaucratic satire: the world is not merely messy, it’s perversely tuned to punish confidence. The quote weaponizes that pessimism as a practical method. It’s not "double-check your work" so much as "interrogate your assumptions", especially the comforting ones. The part you dismissed is where risk hides: the dependency you never documented, the edge case you waved away, the stakeholder you assumed would be fine, the tiny maintenance cost that metastasizes.
There’s also a psychological subtext: we don’t ignore the "unimportant" by accident. We ignore it because it’s boring, politically inconvenient, or threatens the clean story we’re telling ourselves about progress. Bloch’s sentence is a mandate to go hunting for the seductions of simplicity.
Context matters: this is management culture and engineering culture in one barb. Projects don’t die from one dramatic mistake; they die from a pile of "we’ll deal with that later". Bloch’s advice is ruthless because it’s accurate: the failure point is often the thing you were most proud to not worry about.
Quote Details
| Topic | Work |
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