A medieval Persian physician named Al-Razi once argued that the most dangerous moment in treating a patient is when the cure appears to be working — because that's precisely when vigilance drops. In financial services and IT, the same trap closes around successful teams: a period of strong performance quietly rewires attention away from the signals that made success possible in the first place. Al-Razi called this the problem of the 'satisfied diagnosis' — and the 14th-century logician Paul of Venice later identified the same error in reasoning as 'confirmation by silence,' where the absence of bad news gets mistaken for proof that everything is fine. The practical move: schedule a standing weekly ritual — ten minutes, no agenda — where someone on your team is explicitly tasked with asking 'what are we not looking at right now?' Not a postmortem, not a risk review. Just deliberate noticing before the gap becomes a crisis.

In the last 48 hours, which signal at work did you notice but not act on — and what made you decide it could wait?

Drawing from Medieval Islamic Medicine and Logic combined with Systems Thinking — Abu Bakr Muhammad ibn Zakariya al-Razi (The Comprehensive Book on Medicine / Kitab al-Hawi, on diagnostic complacency) & Paul of Venice (Logica Magna, on inferential silence)