ACT IV: THE LIES — What we tell each other
It seems to be very common among people and companies—despite many feeling otherwise—that there's a very high tolerance for error.
In work and human relationships, there are infinite opportunities to screw up, which is completely natural and inevitable… that's one thing.
But letting things go or "turning a blind eye" to errors? That can get complicated, even decisive.
It seems incredible… but people are strange creatures, capable of doing wonderful things and capable of making any kind of mess too. The point is to do more of the former than the latter… this isn't news to anyone.
Now… there are some examples I'm genuinely not willing to let slide. People seem to literally put effort into breaking every basic workplace rule. New workers start and on their first day/week/month they arrive late or don't show up, and everything flows as if nothing happened. When work is light—new hires and not-so-new alike—instead of telling their immediate supervisor, they choose to sit around scratching themselves shamelessly, if not chatting with their loved ones.
I wonder: do people think the company makes money based on doing nothing? Mate, if you don't have work at your job, that's not good news, you get that?
When they actually have to work a bit, they make any kind of blunder (as if they were swamped with work, and this somehow made them incapable of reading or understanding what they need to do to do it right).
However… in many cases, these people enjoy a high level of tolerance (from middle management/bosses & executives), which is related to something that seems to be natural among people: a capacity to overlook things—and these "things" include both "details" and "not-so-details."
There seems to be a fear of confronting errors, of telling someone they're screwing up, of saying that what they did isn't what was expected, that on the contrary, it goes against everything they should be doing, etc.
However, the fact that these deviations aren't communicated doesn't mean "they go unnoticed"… on the contrary, errors are perceived sooner or later and form a concept, an image, that's probably very hard to reverse.
This accumulation results in the first time someone does receive a correction, it tends to be loaded with everything that accumulated before the error—which makes such feedback incomprehensible to the receiver, since the previous situations were never communicated.
That's why, in my opinion, the best approach is to address and communicate errors immediately. There's no need whatsoever to wait or accumulate.
There's no way someone will understand or change their behaviour if no one points it out. There's no need to kill anyone—the need is to communicate what's happening, to address the issues. In short, as the saying goes:
He who warns is not a traitor.
The Taleb Connection
Letting it slide isn't kindness. It's a slow build of fragility one tolerated mistake at a time. Each unflagged error sets a precedent. The team learns the new floor. The next deviation starts from there.
"Wind extinguishes a candle and energizes fire." — Nassim Nicholas Taleb, Antifragile (2012), Prologue
That image is the shape of the article: the same small stress — a missed deadline, an avoidable blunder, an awkward call about quality — wrecks the candle organisation and feeds the fire one. What kills the candle isn't that it had problems; it's that it never got the small ones early. By the time the wind picks up, it has no answer.
The advice to confront errors immediately isn't about being harsh. It's about whether the system gets to learn. He who warns is not a traitor — he's the only person keeping the fire alive.
This article was translated from the 2012 Spanish original and revised in 2026 through human-AI collaboration—clarifying transitions and adding connections to Nassim Taleb's framework.