Skip to content

October 2026

Trust, but Validate

In my formative years working in audit and risk at EY, mostly within life sciences companies, I never once asked a client whether they trusted their ERP system. It would have been a strange question. Nobody trusts an ERP (people have feelings about their ERP, but trust is rarely one of them). What we asked was whether the system was controlled - or, if it was a GxP system, whether it was validated - it was the standard stuff: who had access to what, whether the audit trail was switched on, and what happened the last time something went wrong.

Knowledge That Gets Stronger From Being Wrong

We've come to equate knowledge with wikis, and most wikis are wrong - or at least they will be eventually. That's not a knock on wikis, it's a knock on the assumption underneath them: that the stuff we wrote down is correct. This post is my attempt to argue for a different starting assumption (that it probably isn't) and to explore what a knowledge system looks like if you build it that way from the beginning.