🧨Cautionary Tales

True stories of disasters, blunders and fiascos, told with actors and music, each followed by what the research says about why it happened. Since 2019.

True stories of things going wrong, told by an economist with actors doing the voices and a small orchestra doing the dread. Each one ends with the research: this is not a story about a fool, it is a story about a situation, and you have been in it.

I started it on 2025-03-08-Saturday, on a walk, three days before a launch. That was either very good timing or very bad. I listened to four more that month with what I can only call feeling: one before the pre-mortem on the 10th, one on the tram on the morning of the 11th, and two in the week after the rollback at 02:40, when I was no longer listening for entertainment.

Why it works on me:

• Nobody in the stories is stupid. They are busy, expert and behind schedule, which is a description of my team in February.
• The mistakes are structural: a deadline that became more real than the weather, a safety system that added a new way to fail, a plan nobody was allowed to doubt out loud.
• He never says and so you should. He leaves it lying on the table.

Same presenter as 🎙️ More or Less. This is the one with the actors.

For 🧩 Planning fallacy, and for the Monday in March when I ran a 🧭 Pre-mortem and half the room thought I was being theatrical.