The surveyor's second visit

A surveyor in a village in Menoufia marks out the boundary between two family plots. He is careful and experienced, and one day, working from an old map that nobody told him had been redrawn, he puts the stakes a metre into the wrong field.

Every trade that touches real life has a version of this. The builder pours a slab on the wrong level. The accountant files with the wrong figure. The tailor cuts the cloth a finger too short. It is never a question of whether, only of when and how badly.

Most training ignores that part. We teach people to do the job right and say almost nothing about what to do once they have done it wrong. So the moment arrives and they improvise, usually poorly, usually under pressure from their own pride.

The surveyor has two options. He can defend the stakes, insist the map was sound, and turn a metre of soil into a quarrel that outlives both fathers. Or he can go back, say plainly that he now knows something he did not know then, move the stakes, and start checking for redrawn maps before every job from now on.

The second option is far easier to take if it was chosen long before the stakes went in. Choosing it with an angry neighbour at the gate is much harder, and that is how people end up guarding an error simply because it belongs to them.

Every time someone digs in on a mistake, the mistake grows. A plan for being wrong is what stops the digging.